Underground
by Team Bonet
Summary: Once Upon a Time, there lived a man who did not believe in magic. But something believed in him. Inspired by the video for "Underground," this is the story of how a mortal man became Jareth, The Goblin King.
1. Once Upon a Time

**Note: **The following story was inspired by the video for David Bowie's song, "Underground." Therefore [and mostly due to great laziness on my part], I have used the name David, and have also retained Mr Bowie's mis-matched eyes [mostly because, of course, Jareth shares them as well]. This story, however, is **not **about a fictionalized David Bowie visiting The Labyrinth. I'd love to tell you what it _is _about, but that would rather spoil the whole thing, wouldn't it? I hope you will enjoy it.

* * *

**1. Once Upon a Time**

**O**nce upon a time, in a rented room above a butcher shoppe, there lived a man named David Jones. He did not believe in magic. He had been born two years after the great war to imminently practical parents, Haywood, a Public Relations Officer for a children's home, and Margaret, a waitress at the Ritz Cinema, who had enough trouble struggling to put food on the table, juggling ration cards for just about everything, and raising a boy to bother about such flimflammery as whether fairies fluttered about gardens or toads turned into bankers or any such thing. David managed to get his left eye nearly knocked sideways over some girl at the fine age of fifteen, and the bill that followed his hospital stay only helped to cement his parents' frugal and logical outlook on life.

There were no fairy tales before bed, no fairy lights at parties or on Christmas, no gnome out in the garden. Old Saint Nick did not last beyond David's sixth birthday, and the Tooth Fairy was never so much as introduced. His one brush with the supernatural came in the curious notion that, somehow, dying pirates were keenly concerned with a locker in his possession. "I'll be goin' to Davey Jones' locker," they said in the pictures, and so an eight year old David walked home from the cinema one downcast Sunday afternoon with a small, cheap, plastic locker under his coat. He placed it on his bedroom desk, propped open his window, and settled under the covers, waiting.

The thought of an actual pirate clambering up to his room, sharp cutlass firmly between his teeth and—he realized with a start—no longer living, sent such a paralysing jolt of fear down to David's soles that he tossed the locker in the bin the very next day.

He did not need dead pirates hovering around his locker, and he had no use for magic.

George Underwood, who once nearly knocked David's left eye sideways over the thought of Prunella Reeds ("Hey, mate, you've got me to thank for that freaky, wide open pupil look," he said solemnly), did not believe in magic either. He was always terribly bored at his siblings' birthday parties, when his mum and dad would announce Gadzook the Wondrous and his pack of playing cards. All nonsense, really. What George believed in was David's voice.

"Look, you're an odd looking bugger all right, but you hold a note pretty well. You've got that… that deep thing you do. And those odd squeals of yours. Pretty random, is my mind on that, but not all bad."

He said this in 1962, when they were both fifteen and David was ordered to wear a temporary eye patch, trying not to notice how grabbing onto things he clearly saw in front of him was becoming sort of a bother. He said, "Baritone, George. The lower vocal ranges are called baritone. And I can't be in a band."

By 1964, when anyone who could (or thought they could) wanted to become The Beatles, George (now quite proud of his name) kept at it. "Just think on how popular we'll be with the birds!"

Eventually, a guitar was bought, mates were reeled in (although they kept loosing their drummer), amps were plugged in and stacked up, and the band began to chug its way down the school halls, the auditorium, a couple of university campuses, and onto a few pubs and clubs.

It all sort of stalled then.

They lost their twelfth drummer and Jim, the bass player, married and got lost somewhere in County Cork. "That leaves us me on vocals," David said to George over a pint one Thursday night, "you on the sax, and Tom on the guitar." He was thirty, two months shy of thirty-one. It was already 1977. "This doesn't look good, man." George couldn't argue. He swallowed a gulp of bitter and slumped forward on his stool.

"So, wot, call it a day?"

Hamish Brentshaw, their promoter, a great believer in the magic of profit margins, was on the proverbial fence about any days being called. David's band, Jonesing for Change ("For God's sake, change that name," he said often) (he was often voted down), did not rake in armfuls of quid, no, but it did all right. The kids knew them, the venues were not empty when they played. They held steady, but were obscure enough that few people noticed the new or missing band members. They brought in money.

David cast a disinterested glance at a football match on the pub's television set. "Maybe I should wear a dress," he mused. "What do you think? Or dye my hair. Do you like red, George?"

George was at the bottom of his tenth bitter, and oblivious to the world.

David draped one of George's arms around his shoulders and shuffled him to his flat. He wondered—not for the first time—why either of them still hung on to the notion (an increasingly ridiculous and unprofitable notion) of being in a band.

"I like to hear you sing," George said once. "The audience likes to hear you sing. There's a… kind of magic in that."

"Magic? That's a rather useless word. Why would you say that? Are you drunk?"

"Might be." He emptied the mostly liquid contents of his stomach onto the pavement, stared at it as if trying to figure out what it had been doing inside him. "Well, I am." He laughed. "And I like your voice, Davey boy. Stick it out. You're gonna be bloody great. Everyone will love you!"

"All ten members of the crowd?"

The whole thing remained a mystery to David. Sometimes he figured going on was simply the choice born out of no concrete formulation of any other options. He wiped shower mist from his bathroom mirror on gig nights and pulled his lips into a rueful grin. "You're in a rut, Davey," he said.

He pulled George up the stairs to his friend's first floor flat in Kent on that Thursday night and knew that, come 10.00 PM, he would be on stage at The Bended Elbow and he would sing.

A buzz like a tiny chainsaw rasped out as he jammed his thumb against the doorbell, shoulders shifting under George's weight. A plump woman opened the door. She looked at David and then over at George's nose, partly hidden under bangs longer than the rest of his hair. She wiped hands covered in suds over frayed jeans.

"Why do you let 'im do it, Davey?" she said. "He's got a gig in a few hours and you let 'im get drunk."

"Hello, Sandra," he said. He squeezed past her and tipped George onto a plastic covered couch. "Doing all right, then?"

Sandra closed the door. She had married George in 1973, principally on the strength that, out of several much skinnier girls, he had smiled at her during various shows. She smiled right back. She believed in the magic of smiles. They lit up rooms. They got people into bed, into dinner, and into marriage. Even that beanpole David looked much better when he smiled, crooked teeth and skull cheekbones and all. Smiles were good. The magic of their marriage had lessened somewhat after the birth of Joe one year ago, but now Joe smiled within his crib, all chubby and dazed in layers of baby fat, and Sandra supposed that was all right.

She heard David walk into the living room. "Baby Joe," he said, and she could picture the painful flash of teeth, "how are you, you little…" And the last word was mouthed out, but Sandra knew what it was. Blob. You little blob.

Wonderful with kids, David.

"What time is the show?" she said, as she returned to the dishes.

David hovered by the kitchen door, hands jammed into a floor-length leather coat. "Ten," he said. He cast his mismatched eyes around the kitchen. Not the tidiest place, crowded with faded yellow chairs covered by pockmarked plastic and a Formica table with peeling orange flowers stencilled along its scratched surface. Orange doors sagged from grease stained cupboards. A chipped, battery operated clock, in the shape of a tree stump surrounded by red mushrooms, hung crooked on the wall, and a plastic shopping bag slumped over on the counter, filled to overflowing with trash. David lifted the front page on the newspaper crowning a growing, yellowed heap on the sideboard. He coughed.

"Listen," he said. "I'm gonna slide George into a cold bath, right? Shock some life into him. He'll be the cat's whiskers again in no time."

He disappeared into the living room. Plastic squeaked and rippled as he pulled George to his feet. "Taking daddy for a bath, Baby Blob," he said. "Gotta whip up some saxophone magic for tonight. You betcha."

Magic. Right.

No such thing.


	2. The Alley

**2. The Alley**

**T**hirteen. A portentous number, bloated with meaning, hung round with superstitions like bells on a shrine.

"We've been together for thirteen years!" George shouted over the opening act's assault on trumpets. "Thirteen! And," he held up two fingers, "this drummer Hamish dug up at the last minute, he's our thirteenth."

David shook a can of hairspray and fought his way through backstage equipment and bins, kitchen staff and waitresses in easy-to-spot black, searching for a mirror and a respite from George the Doomsayer.

"And you know what day it is today?" George called after him, pushing a barista aside. "It's bloody Friday the ruddy thirteenth, that's wot!"

"George, _please_. I am dying in my boots here, and I haven't even stepped out there."

The face in the mirror David found was dotted with sweat, hair a fine train wreck somewhere between spikes, waves and limp rags. He raked his fingers through it.

"Witches," George said. David pushed him away with his elbow, reaching up to tease his bangs. The move had no effect, neither on the bangs nor on George. He gave David a solemn look, as if he was lecturing at Oxford and his ever-loving main thesis was being uttered. "Witches come out at the thirteenth hour. The Witching Hour."

"Well it's a good thing there's no such thing as witches, isn't there?"

The number thirteen kept rattling like loose change in a tin within David's head as they took to the stage. Superstition was nonsense, but one word clung to the back of his mind even as song lyrics and stage mannerisms jockeyed for a primary position: years. Thirteen years. They hurtled past David like cars on a freight train, trailing out into a triangular vanishing point he could never reach again.

Hamish was no longer on much of a fence as far as Jonesing for Change went. Their profit margin was shrinking. The equipment and the clothes were their own business (and David had been wearing the same shabby leather coat for weeks now), but he still had to book club space and watch as club owners pocketed all of the alcohol money and a good portion of the door takings.

He was this close to calling out the day George had been so worried about a week ago.

Newspapers came out more readily now, as George and David and Tom and, sometimes, Mick the new drummer sat around a corner booth at The Pig's Snout Pub. Years ago, they had scoured for gig reviews, their blood alive with the thrill of the weekend venues breakdown and the words Jonesing for Change listed with the date and month of the gig beside it. "Have they put an asterisk next to us yet?" Tom said. Asterisk, as in highly recommended, as in can't miss, as in local gods. The answer was invariably, "No," and so the newspapers stopped coming out.

George was never without one now. He slapped it onto the pub table and thumbed straight toward the help wanted ads. He would circle anything promising with a DayGlo yellow marker. Tom, when he was safely alone in his own flat, would rip out calls for guitarists or bassists or both. David read the comics and avoided George's looks.

Mick either still believed in the band or, being as he was a session musician, did not care a rat's arse either way.

"You reckon that was our last gig last night?" Tom said.

"Bloody 'ell," George said, smacking his paper, "this is a Kent newspaper, the bloody local rag! Would it kill 'em to list Kent jobs? Does everyone work in London?"

"Do they train you to carry trays?" David said. "Waiters, I mean. Do they get lessons on how flat to make their palm?"

"I reckon that was our last gig last night," Tom said.

"Any wanker can be a waiter, Davey," George said. "And what in 'ell does Kent need so many fuckin' bricklayers for?"

"Some waiters sing the menu," David said. "I've heard that."

"Last one," Tom said.

They feared a slow and painful death. They got a quick and painful one instead.

Hamish phoned George one Wednesday morning to say, "I'm dropping the act. Sorry, George." He had debated adding condolences, reasons, drawing up a chart of some sort showing clear, diminishing returns. But his heart had not been it. The line cut off seconds after a plaintive, "Tell the others."

Before the day was out Tom had dropped by The Pig's Snout, eyes averted and an awkward sway to his stance. "Um, listen, guys, I, uh…" He drew the palm of his hand back and forth across his Adam's apple. "I'm leaving the band. Got an offer from a group up at Glastonbury. So… aye. Good luck."

David waved goodbye, half leaning out of his booth, as George sat stony faced.

"That bastard," George said. "Could've waited one more day. A week. Would it 'ave killed him?" He picked up his pot of pale ale and dropped it in like a shot. "Bastard." He thudded the pot back on the table, threw David's shoulder a sideways glance. "Wanna find another guitarist?"

"We're off Hamish's roster, George. I think we may have just lost the session drummer as well. We'd need a brand new band."

"So…"

David threaded his fingers together, rubbing the thumbs against one another. "So." George sat to his left like a neon sign. David ran his eyes across a knot in the wood of the table. It looked like an owl, and he followed the ever tightening circles of its body to their end, until his gaze slid off the table and dropped to the floor. Wood. Black pockets of dirt around thick iron nails. "So," he said. "I'll see you around."

"And the band?"

"There is no band right now, George." He unhooked his jacket from the back of his chair. "I'll see you in the morning. We'll catch breakfast. Or something."

In his head, David was already flinching, already hearing George's voice saying, "David, come back!" or, "Yeah? Well fuck you!" or anything, anything at all. George said nothing. David merely walked out of the pub. He wrestled his arms into the coat's sleeves, buttoned it up as he made his way back to his room above the butcher's shoppe.

"That's it, then," he said. The words hummed inside his brain for a while, then slid sideways into nothing. That _was _it, after all. Thirteen years. Good enough. There would still be the occasional dinners with George and Sandra and Baby Blob hogging everyone's attention and that was all right, in the end. Something of a relief.

He passed under an arch, boots clump thud clump thudding in the tight spaces within a branching network of back alleys. Rusted fire escapes and sagging clothes lines hung above his head, blotting out what little remained of the moonlight. The familiar cobblestones and brick tenements around him sank into pockets of black and grey and, as store fronts and street lamps peeked in through haphazard openings, a smattering of pink and red and neon blue.

He had walked these back alleys for nearly five years now. If the gig had been good (not great, just good) (if a gig was great he walked different streets with different people to different flats), he would gaze up at the tenement roof corners as he walked, the moon and stars and silver tinted clouds bouncing along with each step. If the gig had been so-so he would trail his eyes across huge green rubbish bins like tanks pushed up against chipped, graffitied brick walls, smell the stench of days old piss, think it was all rather tragic and poetic. If the gig had been bad he would follow the tired scuff of his boots, notice every darting rat, every puddle of scum and crusted fungi wedged between broken cobblestones. If the gig had been _really _bad…

Well, he did not remember much about what happened afterwards if a gig had blown up in his face.

On this night he kept his eyes on the cobblestones. Black, grey, neon pink glimmer, blue shimmer, neon green spread out like a fan at the corner of a stoop. That last one slowed his pace. Spread out like a fan at the corner of a stoop was not something reflected light did. That was more the sort of thing a light source did. He doubled back. No green light. He wondered if he had doubled back to the right stoop, so he retraced his steps a bit further back. Still no green light.

"Davey?" he said. He nodded at himself. "Yeah?" He—the he that sounded very logical and kind of tired—shook his head. "What are you doing?" He replied that he was trying to track down a green light, some sort of odd glow. There had been something off about it, hadn't there? His Logical Self sighed. "You're tired. Go home."

"Wasn't that the stoop I saw? Over there?"

"Why do you insist on doing this?"

"Yes, it is. That's the very same stoop."

His Logical Self groaned, but allowed him to move his body closer to the stoop. "Nothing there, is there?" His Logical Self said.

There was something, as it happened. There was a thick clump of some sort of fuzzy moss, with three or four flowering stalks pushing upwards. The flowers had not yet bloomed, and lay within tight buds. Nothing about it was even remotely glowing or emitting any kind of light, let alone a green light.

David straightened. He placed his hand at the crown of his head and then brought it down, slowly, over his face. He pinched his lips, stood like that until his eyes finally caught on something (a brick with a crooked nail sticking out of it) and he pulled himself back together.

Green glows. Logical Selves. What a parcel of ludicrous nonsense.

He made it home at a brisk pace, did not bother with undressing, and curled up on his bed, thumping a pillow into a lump beneath his left cheek. His Logical Self murmured something about, "This is the sensible thing to do," but David cut it off with a groan that bared his teeth and soon everything—George, the band, the alley—fell away.


	3. The Goblin

**3. The Goblin**

**D**avid was no longer in a band. Hamish rented Mick out to a group of skinny boys with bright yellow ties and synthesizers. Tom and his new band disappeared into the London Underground and sent postcards from Paris and Berlin and then disappeared from the map. George invited David to dinner.

"Sleeve art," he said. He spooned mashed potatoes onto Baby Joe's bowl. It had pictures of lions and giraffes. Baby Joe scooped up mashed potato in one big, round fist and stuffed it into his mouth. Sandra thought it was adorable. George handed David a plate of macaroni and cheese. "That's where me future lies. Sleeve art. Hamish said he'd show some samples to 'is bands. Posters too, of course. Kent'll be plastered with 'em."

George's posters followed David along the sides of bright blue scaffolding less than a week later. Mars and the Spiders, with The Yellow Buses, Thursday at The Bended Elbow. Some days he liked to read every single word on the posters, silently wish the new band a bit of luck. Some other days he fervently wished for all of the band members to bite a live wire. Could not be helped. He buried his hands into the pockets of his shabby leather jacket and continued on his way.

It was eleven twenty-three on a Wednesday night. That was what his wristwatch said, when he found himself yawning and pulling back his sleeve to check how long he had been wandering aimlessly along the streets of Kent. Eleven twenty-three. He had to get home. He had a job interview tomorrow morning. Some dive on the south side of town, named after some painter or other. Matisse, Monet, Michelangelo, someone like that. They needed a waiter.

A bit of green caught his eye. Light. Neon. Something tickled at the back of his mind, like the rustle of wings, and he found himself slowing down. He stood still, unwilling to turn his head, although he could not say why. He kept the odd green glow within his sight, then began to edge sideways toward it. One step, two, and he lowered his head in fractions, slowly, slowly, his eyes moving in beats, one shift at a time, until the source of the glow was within his eyesight.

The glow snapped off, as if someone had slammed shut a door in haste. But David knew what he had seen. He did not want to believe it, and he was certain to formulate several logical reasons for why he could not have seen what he saw before the night was through. But David knew what he had seen.

Eyes. A clump of fuzzy stalks with eyes.

He found himself moving quickly through the alley. Not running, there was no need to run, but the sooner he got home, the better. He kept his hands within his coat pockets, found that he was hunching into the coat's upturned lapels.

A thud came from up ahead, something heavy and quick against one of the rubbish bins. David heard a scritch and scuttle, almost like a crab, along the pavement. A cat, he reasoned. But cats do not scuttle. A possum, perhaps? A really big cockroach. He kept moving, found that he had broken into a run, even as his mind panted out, "This is ridiculous. This is ridiculous." He did not care. A second thump came from somewhere close to his right elbow, and he pushed on. He could hear a slow rattling, a great big something dragging itself across the ground, heavy as a Gypsy cart weighed down with trinkets and odds and ends and pots and pans and furniture.

Something cackled.

And David slowed down.

He had run into a cul-de-sac. Brick walls, dyed greyish blue under the moon, rose to his right and his left and in front of him. A rubbish bin leaned against the right wall, surrounded by crates of rotted and rotting vegetables, sagging stacks of cardboard boxes, and loose debris. A few pieces of tissue paper drifted upwards in the night breeze, then scattered away like white mice behind David. He thought about following them. The cul-de-sac, after all, could be exited simply by heading back the way he had (run) come.

A shadow, a something, a series of scuttling noises atop the rubbish bin kept him standing exactly where he was. In his brain, the impossibility of magic reared its head. Nothing, he knew, existed in this cruel expansive world that was not human or created by humans. Magical creatures of any kind, miracles, superpowers, gods, the stuff of myth and legend, all of that had at its heart the wellspring of human invention. What he was (staring) looking at now—the something scuttling and cackling to itself atop the rubbish bin—was probably a monkey. An escaped monkey. Yes. With a great deal of hair sticking out of its ears and what really did look rather like a beak on something that was certainly not a bird and it had talons as well, this odd little escaped monkey.

David stood still. The creature had ceased cackling, and was now cracking open one edge of the rubbish bin. It thumped and scuttled and made low, guttural noises as it attempted to wriggle into the bin.

"This is not happening," David said. He wanted to hear his own voice. Perhaps that would chase away whatever that was pulling out a banana peel from the bin. The peel landed with a runny squelch at David's feet. "This is not happening." He looked down at the banana peel, then up at the creature.

It sat along the edge of the rubbish bin, swinging long, bony legs that ended in curved talons. Its head bobbed atop a long neck, so that it flopped left or right every few seconds, like a limp ragdoll.

"You're not a monkey," David said.

The creature's head flopped to the left. Its beak cracked open, and a voice like dry bark and crackling leaves said, "Is not a monkey, is not."

Reality did a very strange thing within David at the sound of that voice. It sequestered itself within the recesses of his mind, like the head of a company convening an emergency meeting, and it debated certain things. Chief amongst them was the improbability impossibility unreality non-existence of magic. Magic, simply put, did not exist. Therefore, whatever that was on top of the rubbish bin could not be magical. And what was not magical could only belong to the one other category of things that David Jones believed in: Real things. Facts. Simple, observable truth.

Therefore, whatever was now picking its nose on top of the rubbish bin was real. Whatever it was, it existed. David could see it, could smell it (like damp moss and wet clothes pulled out from between lime slick boulders in a river), could hear it, and could, therefore, believe in it.

It was a queer sensation, all told. It felt rather like all those years David had refused to eat tomatoes, only to discover that they were quite tasty once he agreed to just bite into one. The reality of tomatoes had shifted within David in mere seconds. It shifted again now with a strange sort of tug at his stomach.

He folded his arms over his chest, his weight swinging casually towards the left as his hips cocked and his legs relaxed into contrapposto. "What are you?"

"Wot is _you_?"

David frowned. "I asked first. It's impolite to greet a question with another question."

The creature swung one leg so that it thumped against the rubbish bin.

"Well?" David said.

The creature's head flopped to the right.

"Explain yourself."

One long talon snapped up to scratch at a grubby tuft of feathers under the creature's chin. "Wot?" it said. "Wot's an Ecks Plane? That a place? Or is it like an aeroplane? I 'ad a toy plane once, I did."

Whatever this thing was, it had obviously been in England for some time, possibly a very long time. Very probably in London, judging by its penchant for Cockneyisms. Interesting. David almost smiled. Decided on two menacing steps forward instead. The creature's head lolled like a broken metronome as it inched back along the bin.

"Who are you?" Step one. "What are you?" Step two.

"I'm, uh… Me name is…" It slapped its feet together in a sudden burst of echoing sound, propelling its lower body forward by slapping its clawed hands down on the space behind it. "I'm Pim! Part of a set, is I. Mum dropped 'er pots day I was born, see. Pim pam _pum_ an' she'd 'ad three of us."

There was more. Pim started in on the shape and size and relative weight of every pot his mum might or might not have dropped that day. David simply had no time for any of that. He dug his hands into his coat pockets, quick like a threat, and closed the fingers of his right hand around the first thing he found. A pen light. Its blue beam struck the creature's left eye. David caught a glimpse of something ochre and watery before the creature yelped and covered its face.

"What are you?" David said again. He kept the pen light trained over Pim's talons. "Talk, or I increase the power of this ray!" Was it on the lowest setting? Christ, it only had one setting. He waved it ominously.

"Goblin," the creature whimpered. "Pim is goblin! Don't 'urt Pim!"

Goblin. In Kent. In some trash strewn alley. David did smile that time.

Reality had become a great deal more colourful within him, branching off in directions he had never even given a second thought to.

Well, well and well again.

He switched off the pen light. "I won't hurt you," he said. "If you show me where you live."

A crate toppled and crashed to the cracked cobblestones, spilling cabbage and water, as the goblin darted away into the shadows. Yellow eyes—reflective like a cat's—narrowed and sunk from view even as Pim's voice echoed out.

"That Pim won't do!"


	4. Get Me Out of Here

**Note: **_Der Erlkönig_ was written in 1782 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and appears here only in part.

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**4. Get Me Out of Here**

**T**he alley stayed in David's mind every day after his run in with Pim. He walked it every night, eyes peeled, senses ready and open. Pim never appeared again, and even the fuzzy moss was no longer at its customary stoop. That was distressing, but it did not stop David from looking and from waiting.

He bought a book on goblins, something second hand, yellowed, and dog-eared, and read it to Baby Joe. Sandra did nothing to conceal her shock. "You're reading? To Baby Joe?"

David bounced the chubby little thing on his knee. "Its favourite position is already reclining. Might as well put something in its fleshy little hands." Sandra frowned at him on her way to the kitchen, David waving goodbye with one of Baby Joe's limp, heavy arms. He barely seemed to register where he was, let alone that David was reading to him. "All right, Baby Blob," he said. "Pay attention now, because this one's important. _The Erlking_, Baby Blob, is a poem by this chap called Goethe. See if you can pronounce that, now or at any other time in your life. Well, this Erlking, some people reckon he's just a wood sprite, others say he might be a goblin. And not just any goblin, but a goblin king."

Baby Joe stared sightlessly at him, blowing spittle bubbles out of his mouth. David wiped them away as he read.

"I love you, your beautiful form entices me;  
And if you're not willing, I shall use force."  
"My father, my father, he's grabbing me now!  
The Erlking has wounded me!"

The father shudders; he rides swiftly,  
He holds in his arms the moaning child.  
Barely he arrives at the yard in urgency;  
In his arms, the child was dead_._

David held Baby Joe above his head, where it gazed down at him as if in a stupor, kicking one chubby leg weakly. "What do you think of that, eh? What a lovely and reassuring tale that is, isn't it, you little blob?" He smiled at Baby Joe, pretending not to hear George protest against David scaring his son before bedtime.

George took David's sudden interest in goblins and mythology in stride. They were now out of steady work, after all. Maybe something had finally snapped within David's logical interior. He had gotten himself hired at some greasy pub, as a waiter, and George often saw him as he headed home, cutting through the same alley he had used back in the days of Jonesing for Change. He caught him bent over a manhole once, tracing the relief letters and numbers like a blind man tracing Braille or some hedge wizard deciphering runes. Runes and David were two things George never thought would come together. Yet here he was, reading stories about goblins and gnomes to his son practically every night.

The alley, meanwhile, waited, silent and dark and patient. It did not even know it was waiting. It knew only that something—something important—was coming down one of its bends. Something that needed to be tested, pushed back and then pulled in. So, every second night or so, the alley shifted. The change was gradual and slow, so that few people wondered about or even noticed new bends, new cul-de-sacs, new archways, new stairs that, should anyone had bothered to follow them, would prove to lead nowhere. To more stairs, perhaps, or to half an arch. These changes occurred only within the deepest corners of the alley, where few people bothered to go. The alley knew that whatever was coming would not be thrown by these changes but, instead, enticed further in.

David gazed up at an ivy covered arch and made a mental note of its position. He had already misplaced the fuzzy moss's stoop beyond any hope of recovery. Last Thursday, his manhole cover had shifted to the right. He wondered if this had always happened, if this was what Pim did. It was a poor way to spend one's life, if that was the case; shifting and moulding some dirty back alley in some small corner of Kent, England. David rather pitied him, when he wasn't busy cursing him for never showing up again.

He dropped down on the crooked steps beneath the arch, his chin resting despondently between his hands. Blasted Pim. Why did he care so much anyway? Goblins existing, he reasoned, granted them no more mystery or import than earwigs burrowing within garden plants. They lived within the soil and ate leaves and stayed right there in their cold, damp spaces and David was pretty sure that they cared not one jot for the humans whose garden they were mangling. Goblins were no different.

Above him, the arch blocked out the moon. David could see less and less of the sky from within the alley with every slow, passing week. The walls seemed taller somehow, the ground beneath him more serpentine. His alley was almost a maze, and it puzzled and annoyed him to no end.

And still, he kept right on coming.

He would wake up tired and listless every morning in his flat above the butcher shoppe and sleepwalk through the morning until it was time for his noonday shift at the Moliere Pub, and then he would work until seven at night and then shuffle over to George's for supper and he would only smile when he read from his book or when he wandered his alley.

"And why, you dolt?" he said. He plucked at a patch of sour grass at his feet and scattered the blades between his fingers. "What do you come out here for?" He sighed. It was a tired sound, much deeper than David had meant it to be. He had intended to sound exasperated at himself, instead his shoulders drooped and his eyelids grew heavy, something keenly sorrowful stirring within him.

"I want to get out of here," he said. "I've wanted to get out of here for some time now. Away from George and our failed band, away from that butcher shoppe flat and away from that useless job I've gotten myself. I just want to get out of here."

He wrapped his arms around his legs and rested his head against his knees. It wasn't like him to be melancholic, and he wanted whatever mood this was to pass. He tried to laugh at himself, but the sound came out weak and half-hearted.

It was then that a faint blue something caught his eyes. Not silver blue like the moonlight, and not blue like a manmade neon sign. This was an odd blue, odd like the fuzzy moss's green light. Breath firmly trapped within his throat, daring to hope, David raised his head.

The manhole had shifted again. Or so David thought, at first. The blue glow was certainly round, designs visible along its interior, like the manhole markings. When he bent to inspect it, though, he saw that it was not a manhole at all. It wasn't even any kind of covering. The light was coming from the ground itself, as if someone had drawn out a rune or spell in glowing ink. He reached out his hand, tentative, before pressing one finger to the light. It pulsed, shifting sideways, before it returned to its original place.

The alley rumbled within itself, stones grinding out unintelligible words in low, cavernous voices.

David reached out for the circle once more, this time with both hands. He pressed his palms flat against it, fingers splayed. He gazed in awe as the lights arranged and re-arranged themselves around his fingers, flipping and twisting like disturbed earthworms. His lips drew back over his teeth, his eyes bright and excited. Here was something at last. Something wonderful.

"Get me out of here," he whispered.

The blue circle remained as it was. David frowned. "Oh, come on, now. You're not going to start glowing on me and not be anything. What are you? Are you sentient?" He looked up at the wall in front of him, at the steps and the arch behind him, at the darkness above and all around him. "Can someone—something—hear me? Something is here with me in this alley; I've already seen it. Pim! I've already seen you! What is this thing?"

The rustle of dead leaves fleeing on nimble feet down stone steps and then, out of the darkness, a rusted, creaking whisper. It echoed within David's head, so that he could not be sure if it was high-pitched or low and deep within the ground.

"What does he want?"

"I want to get out of here."

"Phaugh," said a second voice, one like bark and dead leaves. Pim. "Is not even a proper request, that's not."

The first voice whispered again. "What does he wish?"

Pim made a sound like a startled crow. "Oi now, wot's the big idea, eh? Goin' 'round givin' thinks in silver platters and wotnot. 'E is ter think for 'eself, or I as won't be—"

"Enough," the whisper boomed, although its voice never seemed to rise. "What does he wish?"

David stood quite still. He could feel his heart, beating frantic fists against the walls of his ribcage. George and Sandra were back at their flat, tucking that blob of a Baby Joe into bed. Every other member of the band had blown away like so much trash, and David could not say that he missed a one of them. But George he thought of with a pang of regret. George was his friend, the only life he had really known since he was fifteen. He felt his heart grow heavy within his chest, but his mind was clear. He looked down at the glowing blue circle and he knew what he had to say.

"I wish goblins would take me away," he murmured.

"Is that what he wishes?"

David nodded.

"His wish may be granted."

For a moment, David wondered what it would feel like, being taken by goblins. He wondered if Pim alone would grab hold of him, or whether hundreds would rush at him, or whether the disembodied voice of the alley itself would somehow grow arms and pull him into a wall or suck him into the circle or something. He wondered if it would hurt.

He had not even begun to wonder properly before something sharp and clammy shoved him from behind and then he was falling forward and he was falling into dark and endless nothingness.


	5. The Maze

**5. The Maze**

**E**ven as he fell, David could not be certain whether he was actually falling or merely floating down. Somewhere along the way, he got the odd sensation that he was being handed down, like a helpless child to a fireman, by a thick knot of hands. But then he had pitched over headfirst, and all he could feel was empty space rising up toward him and then passing on behind him.

He was well bored with falling, and heartily cursing Pim and the alley and the manhole and even George for putting him in this insufferable situation, when he finally hit ground. The difference between falling and stopping was so violent that it knocked him quite silly for a while. Pieces of the world were still flittering about as little squares of light when he finally came to.

What he had landed on was a hedge. A very tall hedge. His arms and head dangled off one side, while his legs, stiff and sore, dangled off the other. The ground was pretty far down. After much struggling, David managed to sit up on the ledge. From that vantage point it became quite clear that he had landed in a maze. Precise rows, u-bends, turns and twists and dead ends spread out below and for several miles beyond him. The entire maze was made out of manicured hedges, although they had seen better days. Most were overgrown and chocked with weeds, while others had nearly reverted to a wild, natural state. David spotted one headless bust and an empty, debris filled birdbath.

"Well this is a fine mess," he mused, chin on his hand.

He clambered down the hedge, brushing twigs and leaves out of his hair and clothes after he was done.

"Hello!" he called. "Anybody here?" There wasn't even an echo. He cupped his hands around his mouth. "Pim! Hello! I'm here! Now what?"

Now what indeed. David put his hands on his hips. For the second time that day, he was regretting ever having asked to be taken down that circle. It was all well and good to push him, but was he not owed directions? A map? Some explanation as to why he had been tossed down in a maze? He heaved a miserable, betrayed sigh.

Fine, he reasoned. I'm here. Someone has to be here too. Mazes like the one he had fallen into usually belonged to a palace or a chateau, so following it through was bound to lead him to someone. And someone would lead to food and suggestions as to a place to stay and (perhaps) some work.

Start a new life.

That had been the point, right? To start a new life.

David looked around at nothing but overgrown hedges, and he had a hard time believing that. Still, he had wished this. He looked down at the shadows on the ground. If he kept them at his left at all times, he figured, he would be heading east.

He walked, and walked, and walked and walked and walked. After two hours, he clambered up a particularly unkempt hedge to check his progress. His heart contracted in a very unpleasant way as he saw that he had barely made a dent on the maze. Still fine, he said to himself. I'll walk along the top of the hedges, and then I'll know exactly where I'm going.

It proved trickier than he had anticipated, with his feet sinking into gnarled branches every third step or so. He tried crawling for a while, then sitting on the edge and bouncing and sliding along on his bum. The maze seemed no smaller. Frustrated, he jumped down to the ground.

A loud rip followed him down. "Oh blast it all," he groaned. He held up one end of his leather coat, staring despondently at a large tear. "It's ruined. Blast and curse this stupid maze."

"You'll never get out if that's your attitude."

The coat was instantly forgotten. David whirled round. "You," he called. "You're someone, at last. Where are you?"

"I'm sitting right over here." The voice grunted. It was deep and flinty, and it reminded David of somebody's crotchety grandfather. "And I aim to remain sitting right over here, if it's all the same to you."

"Oh, I'm pretty sure that I don't mind," David said. He pulled himself arm over arm up a hedge again. "You just stay right there and I'll come to you." He surveyed the maze below him, brows furrowed in concentration. Where—?

"There you are," David said.

A man sat right below him, his back against the hedge. He sounded like a crotchety grandfather, and he looked like one too. He wore a red leather cap over white, straggly hair, and a large, bulbous nose was partially obscured by heavy, bushy grey eyebrows. Gnarled hands held a cane fishing rod, the end of which bobbed within a tin bucket. He paid no attention to David as he scrambled to drop down beside him.

"Hello there," David said. "Do you live nearby?"

The man said nothing. He pulled his rod up, checked that nothing had bitten yet, and lowered it.

"I've only just gotten here," David said, "and I'm trying to find my way out of this maze. Could you point me in the right direction? It's rather confusing, this maze."

"Well of course it is. What did you expect?" He picked up a battered straw hat from the ground beside him and clapped it down on his head. "Now be quiet and shoo along. You're scaring the fish."

"But—"

"Move along, kid!"

David wanted to protest, but saw that it was useless. Feeling spiteful, he turned to go, muttering, "Not that I needed your help anyway, you bent old bat."

"I'm a dwarf," he heard from behind him. David didn't bother to turn around. He would find the way out all by himself, and a pox on that old dwarf. Fishing out of a bucket, of all stupid things. Obviously shy of a full deck, that one. David would be very glad to never run into him again.

So he was somewhat annoyed to walk right into his side of the hedge again within less than ten minutes of (stomping in a huff) walking. David spluttered, then headed off in the opposite direction. That led back to the dwarf as well. So did the right turn, and the left, and a good five minutes of blind running and scrambling.

The dwarf seemed pretty annoyed as well. He stood with his fists on his hips, one foot tapping the ground in a cross way, by the seventh time David had stumbled upon him. "What are you doing?" he snapped. "Didn't I tell you to shoo off?"

"I'm trying. Believe you me, I'm trying."

"Well try harder."

By the tenth time David found himself glaring at the dwarf (and vice versa), a certain truth became imminent.

The dwarf heaved a long suffering sigh and shook his head. He looked up at the sky, dotted with clouds and dyed a dirty orange-brown. "Don't suppose you could stop that?" he said.

At first, David thought the dwarf was talking to him, but the way he looked at the clouds and the sky soon made it clear that he was talking to… Who? What? David felt uneasy.

The dwarf picked up his fishing rod. He tipped over the bucket and pulled the straw hat further down his head. "Thought as much," he muttered. He trudged over to David and glared up at him. "What's your name, then?"

"Me? I'm David. David Jones." He whipped his palm over his leather jacket and held it out. "And you are?"

His hand went ignored.

"I'm apparently meant to lead you somewhere," the dwarf said. He took in David's tatty, torn leather jacket and messy, mousy brown hair and scratched face and scuffed boots and dirty fingernails. His stare lingered on his face for a moment, taking note of David's mismatched eyes. After a while, he shrugged. "Hoggle," he said. With that, he turned and began walking down a path to the left.

"Is that your name?"

"Move along, kid. I don't aim to spend all day leading you out of here."

"You mean you'll help me get out of here? Thank you. Thank you ve—"

"Move _along_, kid!" Hoggle shook his head, muttering darkly to himself.

Feeling a great deal more hopeful than before, David followed.


	6. Hoggle

**6. Hoggle**

**N**ow that a guide had appeared, trudging in front, muttering and grunting to itself, David felt a great deal more cheerful about the prospect of living in this strange, golden-tinged world. And, as is often the case when one is cheerful, the maze looked a great deal more romantic and impressive as they made their meandering way through it. Everywhere David looked he could see flowers, from silky, perfumed roses to miniscule, yellow wildflowers. Everything was charming: the unkempt hedges, the knotted roots that kept tripping him, the cracked cobblestones, the moss with its teeny-tiny fuchsia flowers, everything.

"This is marvellous, Hobble," David said.

"Hoggle. And this is a disgrace. Kretch used to be in charge here, but _he_ took off. Some of us stayed, regardless. Some of us even manage to get some work done." He stopped and pointed at a neat and trimmed patch of hedges. "See that?" He jabbed a thumb at his chest. "Some of us stayed."

He was silent for the rest of the way, and David did not mind. He was content to walk behind him, taking in the view. He allowed himself a daydream in which this Hottle fellow led him to a rustic cottage, something straight out of the Scottish Highlands, but with no Britons to spoil the thing, just him and whatever lived here. Goblins, he supposed. Goblins that would view him as an oddity and leave him alone. Perhaps even fear him. Yes, and he could keep chickens. Hire someone to cook and clean. He was not certain whether goblins hired themselves out for that sort of thing, but he felt confident that he could convince at least one of them. Maybe they had elves at this end of the world; beautiful, tall, golden things like the ones he had read about to Baby Joe.

Baby Joe. That slowed David's sauntering steps. He did not know what time it was back in Kent, or what George and Sandra were up to. He pulled back the sleeve of his coat and peered down at his watch. Something queer had happened to it. The hour and minute hands were spinning about wildly, swinging first clockwise then anti-clockwise, not even following each other. The effect was like two insect wings, humming within the watch's interior.

"Huddle?"

The dwarf stopped and turned. His glare was so profound that his eyes were all but buried beneath his eyebrows. "It's _Hoggle_," he snapped. "How hard is that, Mr David Jones?"

"Hoggle, yes," David said absently. He held out his wrist. "What's wrong with my watch?"

Hoggle tossed the watch a thoroughly disinterested look. It had a plain leather strap, and the silver face was too chipped and worn to be of any value. "There's a great deal wrong with your watch. And it's useless here. Where do you think you are, anyway?"

"Well…" Now that he had to put a precise term to it, David found that he had no inkling where he was. Kent had been easy enough to situate. It was in England, and England was part of Great Britain and Great Britain was part of Europe and Europe was on the right side of a wall map most of the time, bobbing there between France and Iceland, a lumpy looking island on the Atlantic Ocean. It was just a speck on a map, but he knew where it was, and what it was called. This place, however… "Well I don't really know," he said lamely. "Where are we?"

"Figures," Hoggle grunted. "You don't have any clue where you got yourself wished off to, do you?" He waved his hands in disgust, as if the very idea of David were repulsive. "Silly human." He grew very serious then, gazing at David evenly with very old eyes. "This is The Labyrinth."

"I can see that. But whose labyrinth?"

"No, no, no. Not whose labyrinth. _The_ Labyrinth." He spread his arms out. "All of this is part of The Labyrinth. And at the heart of it all is Goblin City." He dropped his arms and shrugged. "But nobody goes to Goblin City anymore."

"I'd like to go to Goblin City."

"No. You wouldn't. There's nothing there but goblins." He started walking again, pushing aside a branch sticking out of a hedge. "Lazy, dirty, rootless, useless goblins. They're a race without a purpose, a race without a king. Now me, I didn't have a king. I had a boss. And the boss set me up out here and told me to take care of this end of The Western Only Maybe Eastern Maze. He was _their_ king, but he was _my_ boss." At this, Hoggle's steps slowed. An expression almost like fondness crept through his features. "Good ole boss." He shook his head, and the expression was replaced by a scowl. "And _you_ ain't got no clue what you've wished yourself into David Jones."

David followed Hoggle and did not dare say anything else. The dwarf's words disturbed him and he did not want to be disturbed. If he thought too seriously about what Hoggle had said he would be forced to admit that, up until then, he had thought of the whole experience as an interesting detour. Something in him—something that had kept quiet all the way through the maze—thought that he could simply go back to Kent whenever he felt like it.

The thought of what he had actually done frightened him.

The maze went on for a good long while. Night came more than once, with Hoggle resting his back against a hedge and David curling up as best he could with his coat as a blanket. He woke sore and tired and very, very hungry.

"Isn't there anything to eat around here? I'm gonna pass out if I don't eat soon."

An apple hit him square in the forehead.

"Ow! For pride's sake, Howel, you didn't have to bludgeon me with it!"

"Was not Howel," said a squeaky voice above David's head. He craned back his neck just in time to see something covered in long orange fur, with what appeared to be four green eyes, before another apple was lobbed at his face. "Is still hungry? Is not eating first apple, is he? Have another!" A third apple bounced off David's shoulder, who by this point had dropped to the ground, arms over his head, shouting for Hoggle.

Hoggle sounded peeved. "Stop wasting good apples on him."

"Was what he wanted, wasn't it? Is you wanting apple?" At Hoggle's grunt, the orange creature dove into the hedge it had popped out of. It poked out from the top a few seconds later, holding a peach in one furry hand. "Is wanting peach, eh?"

"Buzz off."

"Is not pixie. Can't buzz off."

David rubbed one of the apples clean against his coat. He bit into it and thought he would die right then and there from relief. He was starving. The first and second apples disappeared within minutes, juice dribbling down David's chin. "My God," he said. "These are delicious. I want another apple," he called out to the creature in the hedge. "Hit me!"

It hit him, aiming one good kick at his right shoulder. It also pelted him with five more apples, and one peach. David crouched down against the onslaught, laughing.

"Thank you, whatever you are," he said, his mouth full of peach and apple.

"Mungwhop," the creature said. "Is Mungwhop." It bowed, blinking its green eyes. "Is good? Is eating apples and peach, yes. Is good."

"Is very good, Mungwhop."

Hoggle was staring at him, his head cocked to the side in a thoughtful way, almost as if he didn't trust what he was seeing.

"Why are you being so nice to it?"

"It fed us, didn't it?" He looked up at the hedge and waved at the creature. It burrowed into the hedge and beat a noisy, crackling path away from them, still jabbering about apples and peaches to itself. "Perhaps it'll feed us again, if I complain loudly enough. Seemed like a rather obliging little fellow, I thought."

Hoggle seemed unconvinced. He narrowed his eyes at David. "Why did you come here? You didn't even know where you were."

"I wanted to be somewhere else." He shrugged. "Don't you ever want to be somewhere else?"

"No. I stayed, see. Others left, but I stayed. Even when they said he was never coming back. I stayed, and I aim to stay."

"Suit yourself."

The sun set a few more times as they journeyed on. Mungwhop—or the same kind of creatures as Mungwhop; it was hard to tell—appeared once or twice to fling apples and peaches and pears and even a cantaloupe at David. He was always very cheerful about it, waving at Mungwhop, asking about its family and about the maze. Mungwhop never answered any of David's questions, but this did not seem to bother him, to Hoggle's great confusion. Whatever it was he had expected from David, laughing and eating apples had never been part of it.

To be perfectly honest, it was all starting to make Hoggle feel rather cheated, and even foolish. He grumbled and grunted and snapped at David's perfectly reasonable questions, like, "Who made this maze?" Hoggle would toss back a dour, "Nobody made it, it's always been here!" It seemed he could not help himself, even though this David Jones fellow had done nothing beyond willingly wish himself into The Labyrinth, thank Mungwhop politely for whacking him with food, and—and this one made Hoggle cringe—put his trust on a complete stranger to guide him out of the maze.

"David?" he said one evening, as they settled down for one more night.

"Yes?"

"Are you planning to stay, then?"

"I suppose. I'm not quite sure how I could leave, after all. Didn't think this through, as you said to me a few days back." He smiled. "Well, implied. A very wise implication."

"Huh." Hoggle tapped his thumb against his knee. "You know, if you should need a place to stay…"

"Why, Hoggle, are you offering me hospitality?"

The sound of his name, his actual name, made Hoggle stare at David. He smiled and winked, and Hoggle found the corners of his mouth twitching upwards. He coughed down the urge and tried his best to frown. "Yeah, well, I ain't promising nothing fancy. Friend of a friend might have a room to let. In Goblin City."

"Is that where you were meant to have guided me? You said, when we met—"

"I know what I said. And I know where I have to lead you."

He said no more then. He tapped a twig absently against a cobblestone and frowned at the ground. David was not comforted by the sight. He drew his coat closer about him.

"Do you _have_ to lead me there?"

Hoggle tossed away the twig. "Yes, I do. Orders. You wouldn't understand. It gets bad if…" He scowled at the clouds and the stars above them. "Well, it ain't good to disobey orders around here. Even now-a-days, with him gone."

"You keep saying 'him,' as if it's important."

"Never mind. Go to sleep. We're nearly there."

An uneasy feeling stayed with David all that night. He gazed up at the moon, unable to close his eyes. Silver tinged clouds crawled across the skies, like giant ships of war, like ominous creatures with cruel, dark wings. They devoured the moon.


	7. The Fairies

**7. The Fairies**

"**H**ere we are," Hoggle said.

Here was somewhat of a disappointment. The hedge maze ended in trailing roots and leafy debris and then went right on being a maze. Only this maze was made of sunbaked, stucco coated walls. They marched away into an unmeasurable distance in orderly, Greco-Roman rows. Overgrown topiary stood atop ionic columns or within pots meant to resemble amphorae. The ground was an arabesque mixture of mud bricks and faded, chipped mosaics in red and yellow and blue. All very Classical, very pleasing, bathed in golden, afternoon sunlight.

"It's another maze," David said in measured tones. "You were meant to lead me to another maze?"

Hoggle shrugged. "Orders." He looked up at David, his face closed and distant. "Good luck to you, David." With that he turned to go, although he paused a moment to say, "By the way, the fairies bite. Hard. The blue winged ones cause an awful swelling. Don't be fooled by them. Just swat them if you see them. Goodbye."

"No, wait!" Hoggle hovered by a hedge, his back to David. "This can't be right. I'm not out of the maze. This is just…" He shot an uncertain look at the rows upon rows of stucco walls. "Just more maze. This can't be right. You said—"

"What I _said _was that I had to lead you somewhere. And I did. I lead you here. The rest you figure out by yourself. Now goodbye, David Jones."

With that, he banished into the hedges. David had no doubt that banished was the right word. He could no longer see or hear Hoggle, or anything else. He thought of calling out to Mungwhop or Pim, but knew the thought was a useless one. There was nothing but him and the rest of the maze now. The Labyrinth, and, somewhere within it, Goblin City. And David with no idea what the first half of that thought really meant, or what direction the second part of it lay in.

"Hoggle!" he shouted. "This isn't fair!"

His voice did not even echo. David frowned at the hedge Hoggle had disappeared into, then turned and headed into the new maze. This one, at least, had walls he could walk on with ease. He just had to climb on them and figure out where the walls became… what? Another maze? It was enough to make David want to strangle something. It was hotter in this part of The Labyrinth, as well. As if things were not annoying enough. David peeled off his coat and draped it over one shoulder, pinching the front of his T-shirt in order to fan some air against his skin, already hot and sticky from the humidity.

Then he began to walk.

Then he began to run.

He sagged against a wall, thoroughly winded, sweat dotting his forehead. He pressed his back against the hot stucco and allowed his legs to fold, so that he dropped to the ground. Hot breath bounced off the knees of his jeans to beat against his face. "Not good," he murmured. "Not fair."

It was then that something light and cool fluttered against the back of his neck. A second later it fluttered away to the left, near his elbow. David raised his head, slowly, slowly, so as not to startle whatever was hovering around him. He found himself gazing into a tiny, perfectly formed, ethereally beautiful female face. Hair like cobwebs spun from sunlight drifted, as if on a breeze, around that face, around a lithe body that shimmered as it hovered around him. Her wings beat so quickly that they were merely suggestions, making surprisingly little noise for something moving so fast.

David stared at her. She tilted her head in a very pretty way, and he could see that her eyes were golden and bright and fiercely intelligent and brimming with a tense, coiled energy. He held out one hand towards her, palm upturned. She smiled and settled down on his palm, one tiny hand resting against his thumb. Her touch was like crisp, cool spring waters.

"You're a fairy," he said.

He swung his hand behind him and against the wall. One quick, decisive swipe. He heard something crunch, felt something sticky and cool and silky spread out over his palm. He waited for his stomach to turn, or for some kind of shock to slam into him. A beautiful fairy was nothing more than some rather pleasant smelling goo in his hands at the moment, after all. He waited for guilt to come knocking. When nothing happened, he wiped his hand against the mud bricks and heaved himself to his feet.

Her wings, he could clearly see now, had been blue.

"Hope that made you happy, Hoggle," he said.

No sooner had he started on his way again, however, than a second fairy buzzed right up to him. He barely had time to register the murderous look in her lilac eyes before she had sunk her teeth into his ear. It hurt. My God it hurt. The bloody thing seemed to have nothing but canines in her mouth. David yanked her off, screaming against the pain. He hurled her away from him, only to feel two more land against his legs. They grinned up at him, all rows of piranha teeth and gossamer hair, before they bit down. Teeth gritted against the pain, he flung himself against a wall, making sure to press the leg with the fairies hard against it. One crunched, the other held on, biting harder for good measure. David reached down, yanked her off, and slammed her against the wall.

He ran. Corners and topiary and mud bricks blurred and bounced and shot past him, his arms waving like an erratic windmill as he tried—and failed—to swat the fairies away. He nearly knocked over a pot and cursed at himself. Couldn't leave it alone, could you, David? Probably wouldn't have bit you if you'd just left her alone. Like bees, probably. But no, you had to kill the bloody thing and now—

"For pride's sake, get off!" he hollered. "Get away from me!"

They bit into his fingers and his arms and his calves and his thighs and one of them held onto his hair and bit down right between his shoulder blades. The force of the pain nearly brought him to his knees, but he pushed on. He tore each new fairy off, or swatted her away or even managed to squash one or two against a wall. The effort skinned his palms. His breath was now ragged and—he realized—well and truly terrified.

He nearly stumbled as he took a bend, and as his arm shot out to keep him steady he realized it was covered in bright red spots, many of which were already beginning to swell. A hard and nauseating something travelled up his throat.

"HELP ME! SOMEBODY!"

A fairy landed on his shoulder. She pushed off and hovered in front of his face as he ran. She pulled back her lips to reveal rows of needle teeth, nestled within a very charming, pretty smile. David wanted to weep.

He raised his arm to swat her away, a cry building up in his throat. The cry turned into a strangled scream as something heavy and clawed closed over his upper arm. It pulled him to the right, and he could almost make out a voice, rising up out of the deafening cacophony of his blood rushing into his ears and his heart straining to burst right out of his chest. "In 'ere!" But he couldn't be certain of anything anymore. His body felt unreal, as if the claw wrapped around his arm had pulled his soul right out of his body.

Maybe it had. Maybe that accounted for everything dropping away without warning, shattering into sparks-filled blackness, as if someone had cracked his skull against the ground.

* * *

Sound returned first, a slow, steady shuffling. On its heels came touch and smell, so that David caught a whiff of pipe smoke at the same time that his joints complained about lying in what felt like a bed made of stones. His skin then began to hiss against the burns and bites running all over his body. Taste came along and rumbled that his tongue could no longer remember when he had eaten last. After a while, and not without some struggle, sight finally decided to join his other senses and David opened his eyes.

It took a while for everything to fall into place, but it soon became obvious that David was underground. Roots crisscrossed above his head, and the smell of pungent, moist earth filled his lungs, so that he could almost taste the iron in the dirt. He groaned as he pushed himself up.

"Hey, Gritta," a rumbling voice said from somewhere behind David, "he's awake."

The slow, steady shuffling made its way into the room, and what closely resembled a living pile of rags stood looking at David. Clawed hands protruded from within two dirty folds and pushed back the rags' upper layer. A wizened, patient face turned this way and that, taking in David, seeming to measure him. David was certain that, underneath all the rags, the face was attached to a long and bobbing neck. The creature in front of him closely resembled Pim, with the same large, hairy ears and beak and watery, yellow eyes.

"Well now," Gritta said. "Yer still a bit swollen, ye are, but yer comin' along pretty good." Her voice had the same crackling quality as Pim's, only there was something ancient about it, like something that has lain, undisturbed, under the forest floor for centuries. She bobbed her head in a wise manner. "Stupid human. Wot were ye tinkin', takin' on a swarm o'the Fay folk?"

"Hoggle said—"

The voice behind David scoffed. "Hoggle? No bloomin' wonder. Never liked the Fay, Hoggle. Would love to see the lot of them banished from this place, I reckon. Not that it's gonna happen. They serve their purpose."

David dropped back onto the bed, wincing as his aching muscles hit what still felt like stones. Gritta tutted and shuffled away to fetch him a pillow. It made a considerable difference. "Thank you," David said, before Gritta grunted and headed off to fetch him a hot drink. It smelled like nothing but steam, but tasted like strong, bark tea. It was surprisingly good.

"Shouldnae pulled ye in 'ere," Gritta said. "But ye were carrying on, an' ye woke Pum."

"Pum…?"

"Me," the rumbling voice said. A round, heavily feathered face with a very curved, very black and very powerful looking beak appeared within David's vision, seemingly upside down as Pum hunched forward to look at David from his place behind the bed.

"Ah," David said. He sipped his tea. "You're related to Pim, aren't you?"

This made Pum erupt into laughter so deep and subterranean that the whole underground room shook. Bits of dirt sprinkled down on David, who placed a hasty hand over his tea cup.

"Pim!" Pum said. "That no good brother of mine. Never far from trouble, that one." Pum chuckled, then wrapped one rather massive clawed hand around the front of David's shirt. Large yellow eyes, considerably less watery than Pim's or Gritta's, bore down into David's. "What have you done to Pim, human? Answer, or I'll—"

"Put 'im down, Pum. He hasn't done nothink to Pim. I'd 'ave felt it. An' so would ye." She tapped her beak irritably. "I said put 'im _down_. Now." She watched, patient and old, as Pum dropped David back onto the bed. "Ye've killed Fay, boy. I'm none too pleased about that. But ye did not hurt me Pim, and fer that a mother is glad."

David looked down in forlorn disappointment at his spilled tea. "Hoggle told me to swat at the fairies. He led me out of the maze. He seemed trustworthy. I will terribly likely not be swatting at any more fairies in the future. In fact, I'd dearly love to never see another one for as long as I live."

Gritta clacked her beak. "Ye'll be seein' plenty o'them if ye stay in these part of The Labyrinth, boy." She shuffled toward the bed, pulled back his blanket, and squinted down at him. "Hmm. Aye, it's lookin' much better already. Shouldnae helped ye, but there ye are." She tossed the blanket back over him.

"Pum," she said. "Keep an eye on 'im, but let 'im sleep."


	8. A Touch of Memory

**Note:** The entity David meets in this chapter is closely based on The Singer of Courage, one of the cards in Brian Froud's _Faeries Oracle_, and is therefore © 2000 Brian Froud.

* * *

**8. A Touch of Memory**

**A**t first there was only darkness, an intangible wall devoid of all light or shape or meaning. David sat within it and waited (hoped) for it to become something other. Eventually, the darkness bleached away to a dull, heavy grey. Edges and outlines began to emerge all around David. Most of them were sharp, the edges of tables and chairs, windowpanes, wooden planks and, a little above his head, a tricycle that looked oddly familiar. As David's eyes grew accustomed to the lack of light, he became aware that he was sitting on a pile of rubbish. And his pile of rubbish was surrounded by further piles of rubbish, stacked to the left and right and as high as the towering heaps of scrap metal at the junkyard his parents never wanted him playing in.

A warm, murmuring wind picked up, scattering bits of napkin and newspapers, magazines and flyers. One piece of paper flipped and stumbled toward David. It caught on his boots and remained there, its edges waving like limp, ghostly arms. David bent down and picked it up. There was a large tear along the top, as if someone had ripped it out of a bulletin board.

"The Mangled Cats," David read, an odd feeling stealing over him. "With Jonesing for Change. 3 October 1976. The Bended Elbow."

He let the paper drop away from his limp hands. He stood from his rubbish pile and looked around him. There was nothing to see, only lumpy towers of detritus and a flat, black sky above his head. He looked down at where he had been seating, and his eye caught on a plastic, red mushroom, half buried under an old, flowered blanket. He knew that blanket, and he certainly recognized the plastic mushroom. He dug into the pile and pulled out a chipped, battery operated clock in the shape of a tree stump, surrounded by red mushrooms. He ran his fingers over it, his mind oddly blank.

"But how…? Where am I? Why is this…?" He dropped the clock and reached out for the blanket. It was his blanket. Sandra had given it to him. It was back at his apartment, above the butcher shoppe. He tossed it away and pulled out a battered, soggy book. _The Goblin Companion_. "I bought this. I read it to Baby Joe. I…"

David's limbs felt as if the blood had drained from them. He sat on the pile across from him, numb and deeply, completely disappointed.

A trash strewn alley. That's where he was. He was back in Kent. Nothing had been real, any of it. He had likely stumbled into the alley, drunk and miserable. Come to think of it, he did remember having one too many pints at George's the night he… No. No, he had not been drunk, he was certain of it. But this was not The Labyrinth. It could not be. It was only a trash strewn alley. In Kent. Yes, in Kent. He had gone back. He had woken up, or come to his senses, or something.

It was amazing how empty and sad that made him feel.

He patted down the pockets of his leather coat, torn and shabbier than it had any right to be for a dreaming man, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. One part of his mind was quietly surprised that they had both survived falling and the maze and running away from the fairies. He snapped the lighter into life. "Only that never happened," he muttered around his cigarette. Smoke rose up into the night, where it was swallowed by the darkness. "Dreamed the whole thing, Davey. And now you need to get back home." He dangled the cigarette between his thighs. "What a waste."

Above him, two stars had emerged from behind a cloud, or something. They had not been there before, but now they stood against the darkness, dim and opaque, like the beam of a torch under water. As David smoked and gazed at them, a third star appeared. Then a fourth and a fifth. And then something strange began to happen. David's hand remained hovering before his mouth, cigarette forgotten between his fingers, as electric blue tendrils of light began to drape themselves from star to star. More and more tendrils burst from the first star, waving and undulating as they passed from bright white star matter to a pulsing, blue light.

David finally took a puff from his cigarette. "Oh, thank God," he said.

It was a while before the stars and light finally settled on a shape, although it was no real shape to speak of. Depending on where one stood, one was either looking at a very bright Southern Cross, a swan with its neck downwards and its wings flapping behind it, a sceptre and a crown, or the downturned face of a horned elk. David rather liked the idea of the elk, and was pleased when the shape seemed to settle on that as well.

A voice spoke directly within David's mind, echoing away into murmurs and whispers, so that there was no other reality but the figure made of light and the voice.

"What does he wish?"

"Oh," David said. He flicked away his cigarette. "It's you. Or is it you? Maybe you're related, like Pum and Pim. Are you acquainted with an alley in Kent? Sounds just like you."

"He may not be so insolent," the voice said, so devastatingly quiet that David almost hung his head in shame. "Does he regret his wish?"

"He—I mean, no, I don't. Well, not terribly. Not until fairies started biting me." He folded his arms over his chest. "Well, actually, I am somewhat put off by the fact that I've been sent to a never-ending maze. Does it lead anywhere?"

"It may lead to the centre."

David dearly wanted to be horribly insolent. He drew in a deep breath. "What is at the centre?"

"He may find that out by himself."

"Ah." Then, after aborting the thought of lighting a second cigarette, "I don't suppose you've come to offer me some help?"

The shape dimmed and pulsed, its tendrils drifting like windswept grass.

"What does he wish?"

"Of course. I forgot. I wish for some help in reaching the centre of The Labyrinth. Or, at the very least, Goblin City."

A sigh of movement, like wings, caressed David's mind, then passed on. It was unnerving, but David did not even dare to breathe too loudly. The shimmering elk's head dipped, the two stars that suggested its eyes flashing brightly for a moment.

"His wish may not be granted."

"What? But—"

Darkness dropped down around David once more. His mouth opened, and he could hear himself cursing and shouting at the shape (elk) (stars) (alley), but no sound came out. Instead, two large wings flapped above his head. His arms snapped up instinctively to shield his eyes, but whatever was above him had no real interest in him. It swooped down, circling the tallest rubbish pile, until it finally perched on top of it, one talon curled around the tricycle David now fully recognized as a childhood toy.

It was an owl. A perfectly white owl. It gazed down at David reproachfully, and David felt small and insignificant, as if he had disappointed everyone he had ever known and cared for. The owl gave David one last, disdainful look before it took flight once more. With a growing sense of alarm, David realized it was flying straight at him. He put up his arms and tried to crouch, but it was moving too fast and now he was—

"Up ye come," Gritta said. "That's enough o'that fer one night, boy."

David drew in deep, rasping breaths. His arms were still hovering over his head, adrenaline rushing through his body as he waited for impact. "It was—it was—My God, and I—I was—" He turned to Gritta with a terrified look on his face. "I was so small."

"You're still small," Pum said. He sat on a pile of bones on a far corner of the room, by the fire. His taloned feet were propped up on a skull. He was puffing on a gnarled, wooden pipe. "Skinny as a pixie, and small." He shifted the pipe to the other side of his beak. "Had a good dream, then?"

"No," David said. "There were these stars, only they weren't stars. They sounded just like my alley. And there was an owl. A big, white owl."

"Owl, eh? Big, white owl?" Pum puffed at his pipe, smoke rings crashing against the low, dirt ceiling. "Did it say anything, this big, white owl?"

Gritta handed David a cup of tea. "Did it say anythin' to ye? Anythin' at all?"

"It was perched on this pile of rubbish. The whole place was nothing but piles of rubbish." He gulped down his tea and closed his eyes. The dream was already beginning to fade, all he had to do was get a hold of himself and shake off the adrenaline. He gulped down more tea. Always good, tea. Even if it was made by goblins. "I was in a dark place filled with towers of junk. My old tricycle was there. Does that mean anything?"

"It means you no longer need that tricycle," Pum said. "But that doesn't matter. What did the owl say?"

"It… it didn't say anything."

"Not a thing?"

"No."

Pum tapped his pipe clean of ashes. He placed it on a branch protruding above his sitting place, then kicked the skull away. It rolled underneath David's bed.

"The owl said nothink," Gritta said. She took the cup away from David. He watched her set it down on the floor, then fling aside his covers and take a firm hold on his ankles. Pum hooked his hands under David's armpits.

"Um, what are you doing?"

"The owl," Pum said, "told you nothing."

"So it's time fer ye to go," Gritta said.

With that, and before David quite knew what was happening or how fast it was happening, they threw him out, back above ground. David landed, hard, on his bum, a jolt of something like electricity shooting up his spine and into his teeth and eyes.

He spluttered. His mouth opened and shut in indignation. A root banged down in one very final sounding thud, and his indignation grew. From spluttering he passed on to a lengthy muttering of, "What in blazes? What in bloody blooming blinking pissing blazes?"

And then, David did something he had not done in years. He fumed. He sat and pouted and frowned and well and good steamed. He glared so long and hard at a hapless mushroom that it burrowed right down into the earth once more, where it lived in terror of a skinny man with mismatched eyes until the day it died.

"How dare they?" David said over clenched teeth. "How dare this place? How dare that blasted owl?" He directed a furious glance at the trees above him.

And that put an end to his desire to fume.

"A forest," he said, somewhat dazed. "I'm no longer in the maze. I'm in a forest."

He felt his lips drawing back in a smile. He jumped to his feet and looked around. While he was not certain what he was looking for, something told him that things had changed for him. Probably for the best. He did not even want to entertain the notion that they had changed for the worse. He was feeling too good.

And with good reason. There, beyond the forest, were the spires and walls of Goblin City.

"There's a good lad, Labyrinth," David said. "There's a good lad."


	9. Cheating the Labyrinth

**9. Cheating the Labyrinth**

**H**is watch no longer worked (the minute and second hands were now flopping about like fleas), daylight was nearly always the dreamy amber just before sunset and night, apparently, only came along when it felt like it, so David no longer had any idea how long he had been within The Labyrinth, or for how long he walked each day. He noted—with no small sense of pride—that he was getting quite good at finding dry, relatively safe places to sleep. He would walk for what he judged to be a good five hours, rest, then move on. The soles of his boots had developed one or two holes, and this was none too pleasing when pebbles wedged in or his socks (now nearly toeless and heelless) got wet and muddy and squishy, but at least the boots were still holding together.

Food, for the most part, remained an issue. But he often did not notice its absence. For the most part. His conscience had gnawed and worried at him for a whole day after he pinched a roasting something with six spindly legs from someone's (something's) campfire, but morals stood no chance when up against the prospect of starvation. David pinched and nicked his way through The Labyrinth, lifting stored nuts, scrumping fruit from orchards clearly marked KEEP OUT OR ELSE, robbing anything left alone on a spit, and even snatching one cooling pie. The cooling pie incident drove Ölek the Hard Helmeted to disown his son, Glapin the Leather Armoured, but David had no way of knowing, and had long since digested the pie anyway.

David's thoughts would find themselves on Kent every now and then. He spared a few fleeting thoughts to George and Sandra and Baby Blob and his rented room (had he switched off the kettle the day he left?), but found that the names had become more words and sketches of what people should look like than real memories. He could recall the shape of George's nose perfectly (straight, with a knobby bit at the end), or one of Sandra's eyes (light brown, with orange flecks), but could not put their faces together properly without a great deal of blurriness.

He could not even remember David Jones properly, the David Jones who worked at that pub with the artist's name and carried trays and walked down alleys. That David wore his same leather jacket and had—for the most part—his same face, but that David had been a sleepwalker. He could see it clearly now. He had sleepwalked all the way into his thirtieth birthday, a shambling, pathetic, soft-spoken joke of a man.

He felt as if he should send himself a postcard.

"Dear David, having a great time, how have you been, send George my love, gotta run, David."

Lacking any real way of checking what he looked like now, David could only guess at how matted or wild his hair looked. His scalp itched something fierce, he knew that much. He also knew his clothes were in near tatters, and there was dirt under his fingernails that had now become one with his skin. When he rubbed at his chin, he could feel considerably more than a light stubble.

But it was his face that felt the most changed. There was something in the way he looked out at the world now, he knew that his eyes were brighter, harder, that everything that had once been skinny and frail about him now seemed lean and tense, like the air crackling with coiled energy before a storm. He was basically a homeless bum in a strange land, but he felt stronger than he ever had.

David was even beginning to enjoy The Labyrinth, from its overgrown hedges and its crumbling, geometric legions of wall to its Greco-Roman vagaries, to its dense, shadowed forests and its cool and dank caves.

Which made it terribly frustrating to realize that the castle at the summit of Goblin City never got any closer.

"Not fair, Labyrinth," David said. He sat under a tree, shaving with a (nicked) razor in front of a (filched) mirror propped up against a boulder. "Now you're just being spiteful. But I will reach Goblin City. Just you wait."

The minute and second hands on his watch graduated from jumping fleas to jiggling masses of molten copper and the castle was still somewhere behind David. He walked straight toward it only to find it even further away and to the right. He tried taking only left turns; the castle kept a steady place someplace beyond his left shoulder. He asked directions from a pair of somewhat befuddled hairy caterpillars. He got himself cussed at and kicked by six inch, orange haired women that lived within a dried up well just for trying to ask them for directions. Any pointers he got led either in circles or nowhere or both, as David found himself at the bottom of a nearly perfectly round foxhole. He clambered out plotting bloody murder, but determined. The castle was mocking him, and he would not be made a fool of.

"I _will _reach you!" He shook his fist at the far-off city. "Don't think I won't!"

But, try as he might, the castle and the city always remained to the right or the left or miles ahead or just a few feet behind or so tantalizingly close he would run towards it in triumph, only to discover he had overshot it by a good ten miles.

He curled up within a hollowed tree trunk one night and thought his dilemma over. The elk had promised nothing, and just the thought of the owl made David cringe with an unnamed shame. Hoggle was gone. Gritta and Pum had been no help. Everyone and everything else seemed to be either potty, oblivious, undeniably insane or incredibly rude. David suspected these were all internal defence mechanisms. He very much doubted The Labyrinth's inhabitants were aware of doing it, but there it was nonetheless. "It may lead to the centre," the elk had said. May. As in, it was looking likelier and likelier that The Labyrinth purposefully kept intruders away from Goblin City.

Not a comforting thought, that.

David peered out of his sleeping spot at the one tower he could see of the castle. Lights came and went at windows and doorways and down alleys along Goblin City, but no lights ever shone from the castle. It looked abandoned and toothless, as if only a few sticks were holding it together. They had no king, Hoggle said. That was fine by David, who could not even imagine what the scattered, somewhat confused denizens of The Labyrinth would do with a king, even if they had one.

But something about the castle drew David to it. It was the centre of The Labyrinth, he was certain of it. And whatever life he would carve out for himself there, it had become imperative that he outwit The Labyrinth and reach the centre. He wanted to thumb his nose at it and flash the birdie at it or maybe spit at it or maybe even something ruder than that. He would laugh at it and win and then he would settle down for good and no one would be able to say that David Jones had been hoodwinked by several hundred miles of maze.

* * *

Tired. Hungry. Nothing to filch. Sleeping in fits and starts. His boots were falling apart and his leather coat was nearly in shreds along the ends and he stank. He well and truly stank. He would crawl, if his pride had no kept him on his feet. The Labyrinth was mocking him, and it galled and infuriated and frightened him. He was close to tears.

George. He missed George. He missed Kent and damp, chilly, misty, crap English weather. He would kill for a bus stop and a pub with the BBC on the tellie, primly informing disinterested patrons about the alarming cost of petrol and the near disintegration of English society at large. Punks and queers and sorely pissed off miners were going to detonate London. Those were the days. Good ole, unemployed Kent. David would give his one good eye to see a glen or a sheep or a suburban bungalow or the post or some random old biddy on a bike.

David put his hand up to his cheek. It came away wet. He sniffled and let it be. A good cry would tire him out, let him sleep. He dropped to the ground right then and there, fat tears streaming down his face. God, he even missed his Mum and Dad. Dad was dead, but Mum still lived in Kent, in his old, childhood home. The thought of her, sitting by herself and staring into empty lonesomeness, made David sob with a force he had not felt since he was a teenager.

"You win," he said. "Keep your stinking Goblin City. I want to go home. You hear me?! He wishes to go home!" Not having expected anything, David clambered to his feet. He scrubbed away his tears and shot one last, deeply reproachful look at the castle. "You win, you bastard."

And he turned his back on the castle and began to walk. It hardly mattered where he went. He turned his thoughts fervently towards Kent, summoning and holding onto every detail he could remember: the peeling, yellow block letters of the wooden butcher shoppe sign, the bus stop with the dark green and red Chivas Regal advert, the brass doorbell, round, with scalloped leaves, to George's apartment building, the swirls and whorls (like an owl) (forget about the owl) on the Pig Snout's Pub's corner booth. And he kept walking, and the castle stayed far behind.

The Labyrinth felt him walking, and, on the surface, it lay perfectly still. Below ground everything from the smallest pebble to the most wizened root and opinionated speck of dirt churned with activity. Something was wrong, and it had to do something about it. Hums grew into shivers and shivers into ripples until the ripples had grown into full-blown tremors every creature could feel.

All save David Jones. He continued walking on, thoughts firmly on the raising loaf at the bakers two blocks from his flat.

He would start a new band. He could. He would.

He would walk until The Labyrinth would take notice and send that elk thing and he would wish himself right back to Kent. Just like that.

With one final tremor, like the lumbering footsteps of a giant, The Labyrinth made its decision. The earth stretched and shifted itself, groaning with the sudden, desperate strain, and then lay still once more, firm in its adopted course, if a little bit resentful.

David's footsteps slowed. He folded his arms across his chest and came to a full stop. The look on his face was one of cunning triumph and perverse satisfaction.

"There now," he said, "that wasn't so hard, was it?"

Before him loomed the gates of Goblin City.


	10. Goblin City

**Notes: **I just want to take this small space to thank all the people who have been reading and commenting. I'm glad that (thus far, at least) you've been enjoying the story. Needless to say, I love _The Labyrinth_, and it gives me great joy to share my love of it with all you fine people. And now I feel like a politician, so I'll just say, "Cheers."

* * *

**10. Goblin City**

**G**oblin City was a dump. A real dump. Having worked as part of The Labyrinth's maintenance detail for nigh onto three hundred years now, Hoggle knew a dump when he saw one. Nobody outside of the city gates—with the possible exception of the inhabitants of the Bog of Eternal Stench and a few of the less discerning folk at The Grumbling Wastes—would be caught dead allowing their corner of The Labyrinth to be as completely, utterly and shatteringly covered in filth as the goblins within the city did. They walked, rolled, crawled across and waded through trash and waste and animal dung and things considerably less palatable than that.

The city was built upon a sharply sloping hill, with the castle at its summit, casting its shadow over everything. Once, so many years ago that no one really remembered, the city had been a collection of modest, white-washed stone and timber cottages, with shoppes leading down to the lowest point of the city. Circumventing the shoppes were side markets and bazaars. A goblin whose name no one could remember had even commissioned a fountain. There was even talk, among the truly grizzled and bent goblins, that there had once been trees and creeping, flowering vines.

Those days were firmly in the past. The cottages now sagged into one another, weighed down under clothes lines and junk heaped onto their roofs. There was less a sense of architecture as there was of piles of rotted timber left here and there. Orderly backyards had given way to pigsties that spilled out into the main thoroughfares. Chamber pots were emptied into the streets below, were they festered amidst the droppings of flocks of chickens and bands of pigs everyone claimed belonged to their no-good neighbour. Goats clambered over rooftops and ate the roofs' thatching, bleating at and biting anything that came near. It was not unheard of for a family's roof to come crumbling down—goats and chickens and somebody's baby and all—at supper time. When this happened, the debris was swept out into the street, where it remained for months on end, and the family simply moved in with their in-laws. Every house—hovel, really—was overcrowded and stuffed to the rafters with all the stench it could muster.

"This place is a disgrace," Hoggle grumbled. A flock of wayward chickens, their bellies coated with mud, clucked and hopped out of Hoggle's way, cheerful in their indignation. One of them nipped at his ankles, and he aimed a kick at it. It squawked out of his reach, and he scowled at its retreating rear. "A total disgrace. Don't know why I bother coming back here."

The city was noisy enough on any given day of the week, but today it seemed particularly cacophonous. Over the usual cascading caterwaul of chickens, goats, pigs, goblins, hobgoblins, and even flies (mutated to unnatural sizes within the city walls), Hoggle could hear a shrill commotion echoing down from an alley just up ahead. Some idiot must have eaten some other idiot's goat by mistake, he thought. Stupid. Nobody knew which goats were whose anyway. But whatever this was, it sounded serious. He could make out laughter and taunts, and one or two goblins ran into the alley carrying spears and rattling in ill-fitting armour.

Several other goblins were in there already, tormenting what closely resembled a bundle of sticks wrapped in black, trailing seaweed and caught in a net suspended above street level. Whatever it was had about ten goblins beneath it, poking it with spears and whacking every inch of it with pots, pans, and one heavy looking rolling pin. It was none of Hoggle's concern. If it made goblins happy to beat up living bundles of sticks, then that was their nasty business.

"Take that, intruder!" shouted a goblin wearing a sieve as a helmet.

A reedy goblin hefting a frying pan cackled. "Give it a taste of this!"

Its cackle was followed by the frying pan swooshing through the air, then a thoroughly put-out yet strangely cheerful, "Ow!"

Hoggle came to a sudden stop.

He knew that voice.

He backed up, eyebrows knotted in disbelief, to peer into the alley. A goblin in a rusted breastplate pushed him aside in order to squeeze into the mob. "Don't block the way, blockhead!" Hoggle found himself shoving and elbowing his way forward along with the other goblins. A goblin female with large red boots handed him a spear ("Have a go at it, dwarfy!"), and Hoggle was too stunned to refuse the weapon.

The bundle of sticks had shifted within the net, dirty, skinned fingers grasping the ropes in an attempt to pull itself up and away from a pair of white hot fire tongs. Messy, matted brown hair covered most of its face, but Hoggle no longer had any doubts as to what—who—was inside that net.

"David?"

Mismatched eyes, one blue and surprised, the other nearly dark and somewhat dazed, locked on Hoggle's. "I mind the fire tongs! The poking was painful, but bearable. The fire tongs are a bit gruesome!" A disturbingly malevolent cheer went up at his words, and David resumed his fruitless scramble upwards. He kicked a few spears away, for all the good it did him. "I wouldn't be adverse to some help, Hoggle!"

"No help," a goblin said, prodding at David's ribs with a broom stick. "Drive out the monster! Take _that_, you ugly beast!"

Hoggle scoffed at the ludicrous sound of those words at the same time that David protested, "Yes, yes, well and good, but can I be driven out by something _not _heated and quite so deadly?!" Hoggle wasted no time then. With a roar that would have made any wild dwarf proud, he swung his spear arm in a wide arc. Several goblins were knocked sideways. Twirling the spear above his head, Hoggle scattered goblins out of his path. He jabbed and stabbed and whacked at the crowd gathered under the net, so that goblins dispersed in a groaning surge of grumbles and panicky yelps. "GET OFF!" Hoggle hollered. "Get ON with ya! You'd _better_ run, or you might find yourselves in DWARFISH STEW!"

David pulled a face. "Good Lord. Really?" The civilized distaste was brought up short by Hoggle slashing at the bottom of the net, so that David tumbled out of it and into an untidy heap on the muddy cobblestones. One ankle protested, and his stomach took personal issue with the smell wafting from the fetid puddle David's face nearly landed on.

"GO ON!" Hoggle was shouting, grasping his spear above his head with both arms. His eyes were wide and bright. Not quite sane, some might say. "_Off_ with ya! Run away, you yellow livered _cowards_! RUN if you know what's good for your slimy _behinds_!"

David raised one arm to wipe his face clean. One look at his filthy sleeve and the arm was dropped right quick. "That's charming, Hoggle," he said. "I never suspected you could be quite so…" He wanted to say scary. He settled for, "Forceful."

Hoggle threw away his spear, suddenly calm as you please. He shot David a closed look. "So," he grunted. "You made it. You look like sh—"

"—oh, and I smell like it too," David said cheerfully. He could afford to be cheerful now, with white hot tongs and a net and tormenting goblins out of the picture.

Hoggle watched as David tried—with not much success—to straighten out the hopeless devastation that was his hair and clothes. "How did you get here?"

David favoured a crusted something clinging to his sleeve with a dazzling smile. "I made The Labyrinth believe I was devastatingly sad and ready to just leave. I nearly bought my own performance. It was brilliant. Well, the place obliged by bringing the gates of the city to me. Rather easy to boss around, this Labyrinth of yours, once you get the hang of it. I'm surprised everyone doesn't simply do it all the time. I suspect they might be, at that."

"No," Hoggle said, "they're not. Nobody can."

But his voice was so low and hushed that David did not hear. He was busy lifting pot lids and peering inside, only to draw back looking as if he had seen the festering contents of a goblin's stomach. Perhaps he had. He looked happy and curious again, just like at the maze. Yet something was off. There was a steel undertone to his voice that Hoggle had not heard before. "Aren't you going to show me around?" he said. "I seem to recall you offered me a place to stay."

"Did I?"

"Now, Hoggle, don't pretend you've forgotten. You've already abandoned me to flesh eating fairies, and that caused me some small grief."

"Is that what you think I did?"

David ran his eyes over a rotting raven carcass dangling off a hook with vague distaste. "Didn't you?"

"I did no such thing! I followed orders, was all. Warned you about the fairies, didn't I?" Hoggle stomped ahead of David, fists clenched. Had a good mind to put him back in the net, set some criminally inclined goblins on him. "Seems like you made it out all right. I had orders."

"Who did the orders come from, Hoggle?"

David was smiling, but his eyes were hard and distant. The corners of his mouth strained under the pretence of mirth. Hoggle shifted uncomfortably where he stood, disturbed by the sight in a way he could not articulate. After an awkward, heavy while, he threw up his hands. "I just follow the orders. T'aint none of my business where they come from. And you made it out all right," he added, gaze firmly averted.

"Do you take orders from anyone?"

"It depends…" Hoggle coughed, shifted where he stood, then rubbed thumb and index finger together in a manner David understood all too well.

"You want money?"

Hoggle waved his arms in a dismissive gesture. "Phaugh! Money. Human nonsense. No. But… compensation, yes." He shot David a crafty look. "Not your watch. Something a bit more valuable."

Days (months) (time was so strange in this place) ago, David would have been thrown, even wounded, by Hoggle's display of dispassionate greed. Things were different now. David thought of himself as two different people: the David who had fallen into the maze, and the David who stood before Hoggle now. He was dirty and tired and on edge and still crackling with the sense that something vital and powerful had changed within him. Even as he thought all of these things, his hands busied themselves digging in his pockets. He pulled out two pence, his lighter, and the pen light. Hoggle bit into the two pence, shook the pen light with a puzzled frown, and sniffed at the lighter.

"Unique, human artefacts," David said. "Two pence made of bronze, lighter out of silver. Neither of them is plated. And the pen light," he paused for dramatic effect, "is electric."

"Huh." Hoggle twisted the bottom of the pen light, jumping a bit as its blue ray slammed into his eye. "I was hoping for something a bit more valuable…" Not exactly an honest reaction. Any one of these items would make him the envy of several dwarves, sprites and goblins he knew, but why should David be any wiser? "But these'll do. For now."

"Good. I want you to guide me into the castle."

Hoggle's eyebrows shot up. He pocketed his new treasures and started off quickly down the thoroughfare. "Get somebody else," he called out. He could feel David pushing his way through the crowd, trying to catch up, and Hoggle moved his legs as fast as he could. Curse his short legs, and curse David's beanpole height. Within seconds, David had grasped on to his sleeve.

"Oh, come on, Hoggle," he pleaded. "I've come this far. The castle is the centre of The Labyrinth, isn't it?"

Hoggle threw hasty glances around him, making sure no one had heard David. He grasped one of David's bony wrists and pulled him along to a cul-de-sac, shushing him in a loud, urgent whisper whenever David so much as parted his lips. He shoved David under an arch made by an old desk that had wedged against the high wall above, so that they stood within an isolated pocket of rubbish. Somebody's living room, from the looks of the smashed chairs and lanterns and one lonely book. Hoggle pulled a worm eaten door free from the trash pile and stood it so that it blocked the entrance afforded by the arch.

"Nobody goes into the castle," he said in a harsh whisper.

"I've come this far."

"Then just be glad for that and go on your way. We'll go to my friend's house, Wrim. He'll set you up an' you can do…" He looked doubtfully at David's rather sorry appearance. "Whatever it is that you do. You could stand a bath, for starters."

David crossed his arms. It was amazing how much taller that one gesture made him look. He seemed to tower over the cul-de-sac. "You accepted my payment, Hoggle. You are now bound to do as I say."

"Am no such thing."

David tried another tactic. From tall and imposing he switched to open armed and flattering. "You can't possibly be scared, can you? Why, you drove off at least twenty goblins all by yourself just a few minutes ago. You're a brave dwarf, Hoggle."

"Goblins are child's play. The castle is _his _territory, and I ain't leading you in there."

"Fine." David removed the worm eaten door and ducked under the arch. "So be it. I'll guide myself in. Thanks for your help, Hoggle." He paused then, and looked back at the dwarf. His face softened, and he was the old David again. "I'm disappointed that you won't guide me, but you saved my life. Thank you. Fairies notwithstanding, you're a good friend."

With that, he made his way out into the crowded city once more. Hoggle could see his mousy brown head over the throng, and he followed it until it turned a corner and away from view.

"Goodbye, David Jones," he said. "I really hope I'll see you again."


	11. Castle and Kings

**11. Castle and Kings**

**T**he castle rose from the summit of Goblin City. Curved, jagged teeth, like the tusks of some prehistoric monster, rose from the rocky ground and along the castle's lower wall, inverted flying buttresses whose function David could only guess had once been cruel and macabre. There was no clean break that he could see between the ground the castle stood on and the castle itself, as if the entire edifice had pushed itself up from the earth, shaping and warping rock until it had erupted in towers and battlements.

One tower stood apart from the rest. It had likely once been sheathed in pure gold, topped with a gently curved roof that met in a sharp point. The gold was dull and crusted now, bits of it chipped away so that the white, sunbaked rock showed underneath. David could just make out a stone balcony, and cobweb laced darkness beyond.

He patted his coat pockets and pulled out his crumpled pack of cigarettes. He was about to indulge in a disappointed sigh at the sight of the empty packet, when he remembered Hoggle had taken his lighter. He tossed the empty pack behind him, shoved his hands into his pockets, and strode towards the castle's main gates.

A helmeted goblin in armour rusted a deep red clattered out from within a sentry post along the bottom of the castle wall. It pointed a spear at David. "Halt! Identify yourself!"

"I—" No. No good letting this goblin see he was surprised. Play it cool, feet casually apart, hips cocked, voice haughty yet polite. "Master David Jones, from Kent. I request entry."

"On whose authority?"

"On whose—?" David brought his fingers up to his temples, as if the very notion of whose authority he needed were embarrassingly painful. "Oh, please don't tell me they forgot to send the permission slips through. Again," he added, eyes rolling heavenwards. "This is really too much. I applied for the proper forms months ago. Months. Do you know how far I've travelled?"

"Don't know, sir. How far?"

"_Very _far, and I object to being treated in this manner. This is a gross offense in the Kingdom of Kent."

"Kingdom, sir?"

David drew himself up to his full height. "I am a representative from his Most August Royal Highness, King George the Eighth, Lord of the London Marshes, Prince of the Hamish Vales."

The goblin's eyes, blue and rather large, blinked from behind his visor. "If you will pardon my saying so, sir, you look like—"

"There's a _war _going on, man! We have been invaded by Punks. I have escaped but with my _life_. Now would you kindly let me in? One grows impatient." David tapped one foot on the ground, then said, "Do I need to lodge my considerable displeasure with your superior?"

Pŭnsch, for this was the goblin's name, had already gotten in trouble with his superior twice that week. Some goblins just couldn't catch a break. A third offense and it would cost him this job, and Zetta's baby was due in two months. No, no, no, the last thing Pŭnsch wanted was this incredibly dirty creature from Kent stirring up trouble.

"Uh, look," he said, lowering his spear, "I'll just wave you along, right? Permission forms likely got buried in some bureaucratic jumble somewhere. No accounting for government types, right? So you go right on in, sir. Go right on in."

There was an almighty groan of crusted hinges, and one of the gates cracked open, then got stuck half-way. The second gate never even budged, although its top jiggled in an aborted attempt to try and move.

David swept past the goblin guard in a tattered flounce of muddy leather, chin held high. "Most obliged. Kent shall not soon forget your forthwithness."

He strode on in aristocratic grandeur until the one gate gasped and grunted back into place. Then he walked for a bit more, shoulders shaking as he nearly sobbed out a laugh.

"My God," he said to himself, half afraid the guard would hear, "I really don't know where I get the gall to do that. Forthwithness, indeed. Now, let's see this castle of theirs."

The castle was deserted. The down blanket heavy silence of decades of dust and undisturbed rooms hung in the air, pressing down on David with the burden of hundreds of cobwebs like shrouds and layers above layers of dirt. There were no footprints on the stone floor save his own on the entry hall behind him. What little light fought to squeeze past grime crusted glass windows and heavy, moth-eaten velvet curtains filtered through as grey and murky as old dishwater. Dust and insect carcasses were so thick underfoot that David's passing made no sound. There was, he noticed, very little furniture. Probably stolen. There really was no accounting for government types, especially with their king gone.

Someone had obviously forgotten to inform the security detail of that particular turn of events.

David made his way up one tower's spiral stairs, was disappointed to find an empty room with no windows. He tried several stairs, making his way in a hushed procession all along empty ballrooms and kitchens and dining halls and what he guessed were bedrooms.

He stood gazing at what could only be a fireplace and he wondered, not for the first time, at the oddly human and bafflingly English feel and lay of the whole land, so to speak. If he had not been standing right where he was, his ankle gently throbbing, fairy bites only tiny red splotches along his skin now, and his stomach knotting and writhing in pangs of pure hunger, he would think this was all a dream. A dotty English chap's dream.

But David knew it was real, and that was the strangest thing about it.

He was trying really hard not to let even himself know what a letdown the castle had been. He dutifully peered into all the rooms and at all the architectural motifs, all contorted, ghastly faces and stylized vine plants and demonic creatures twisted into convoluted and unholy shapes, as if a mad Medieval artist had been allowed to build a cathedral for the damned.

David dropped down on one of the few chairs he found, a grime coated, tanned leather affair with what looked like antlers for armrests. His chin sank into his palm, legs splayed out, devil may care. "It doesn't make any sense," he said, his voice muffled by the silence and the dust. "Why would the entire Labyrinth protect this place? There's nothing here. There hasn't been anything here for years."

"No. There has not."

He did not scream. David could be proud of that. He did jump straight out of the chair, though. And, to his great embarrassment, he discovered that his idea of a defensive stance looked very much like a man about to leap out the nearest window. He nearly bolted from the room as he stared at the creature who had spoken.

It was old—ancient—and it was very blind. Its eyes were covered in a slimy white film, wet and viscous, like something you might cough out of a sick lung. So much dust covered the creature's hair and sunken face that it was as white as fresh snow, its bent and gnarled body buried branches. David could not tell whether it was dressed or merely covered in its own hair and folds of cobweb. It spoke in a distant, deep and faltering voice, as if it were only mouthing words rising from below the ground. The letter S was marked by a whispering sort of whistle, and David was not surprised to see that the creature could barely move its mouth.

It raised a bent, white arm, its fingers curled up like those of an arthritic elder. "You, boy," it whispered. "What… are you doing… here?"

I wanted to spit at your king's throne, maybe flash the good ole middle finger at it, possibly piss against one of its legs.

Probably best to lie. "I got lost."

"Strange place… to get lost in… young man." It bent down in a slow and laborious crackle and pop of bones. David cringed. The creature ran one curved finger over the ground. It waited, then nodded. "Yes. We have no… king. We had ones, once. They… left. Long life to the Kings Jareth."

"What—" David winced as the creature's face turned towards him, one liquid eye wandering to the left. "W-what happened to the king? To the kings?"

The creature bowed its head. It remained like that for a while. When it began to speak, it was in the steady, sing-song voice of a storyteller.

"Once upon a time, the first goblins arrived at this place. They were nomads, chased here by creatures greater than themselves. Ogres, elves, giants, and unicorns. Jareth led the attack against these greater creatures, and it was Jareth who led the goblin armies to victory. His victory was these lands. He won these lands for us. He was a brave and wise goblin. He was our first king. We were taller then, stronger. We fed off the humans' dreams, and the humans believed in us then, as you believe in your own legs and arms.

This was the first King Jareth.

Our second king was Sankrėl, but he took the name Jareth in honour of our first king. He ruled for hundreds of years. And he realized that humans' dreams were changing. Goblins had lost their power in the human imagination, and newborn goblins were smaller and weaker," here the creature frowned in the way the very old do that mourn ancient ways, "and of less intelligence and cunning. Our third king was not Jareth because of respect, but because most goblins no longer realized it was not Jareth II upon the throne. In their minds, there had always been and would be only one King Jareth.

And there were many more, some wise, some foolish. Mostly foolish, as humans became cynical and hardened and turned away from magic and myth."

It paused, then said, "And then the eleventh King Jareth simply left. He is gone. And thus you find his throne room empty, young man."

David's breathing had been deep and slow until then, caught up in the ponderous cadence of the creature's story. Now he started and stared at the dirty chair he had dropped into. "That's his throne?" He felt cheated. Deeply cheated. It was not even worth kicking. "I came all the way here for an old chair?"

"I… am afraid… so. My apologies… young man. If you had… but come… one thousand years… ago." The creature's lips—a small, curved beak, David could see now—cracked open in a wheezing laugh. "But… you humans do not… live that long… do you?"

"Not usually, no," David said.

"Not… ever. It is your curse… and, some say… your strength."

Silence spooled out between them, an invisible thread of things unsaid that David could almost feel tugging at his navel. An unnamed, heavy something settled in his stomach, until the weight of the castle was almost physical. This was not the triumphant comeuppance he had envisioned, and David wanted nothing more than to leave the castle and leave the spirits of the Kings Jareth behind.

He tossed the snow white creature a sideways glance. "Well then," he said, "I'll be off, shall I? It was nice meeting you, um, sir."

The creature never moved or shifted its sightless eyes, but David could feel it watching him nonetheless. He had nearly crossed the room, was just a few feet away from the door. Just a few steps and he would be out in the city once more. He would find Hoggle, never mention this to him, and move in with that friend of his. Yes, that sounded like a good plan. Only a few feet to go.

"You will… forgive me," the creature said in its odd, dead skin whisper, "but I am afraid… that we have never been too fond… of humans."

David's left foot caught on something. He stared down at it, only to discover that it was fastened to the floor. A cream coloured, gelatinous something had risen and flopped over it. Within seconds more of it had crawled and flopped over David's right foot. It began to stretch and spread at such an alarming rate that David barely had time to make a sound before it had surged and clambered all the way up to the bridge of his nose. It was cold and silky and wet and alive; David could feel its veins pulsing all along his skin. A piece draped itself with an oozing snap over David's head, so that all that remained uncovered were his eyes.

As the goop began to hang down over his good, right eye, leaving only the left to stare in hatred and terror at the creature, David noticed something strange. The world had been flatter and muddier for David ever since George had nearly knocked his eye sideways, but now it was clear and bright. At its luminous, white centre stood the creature, its neck twisted in a very unnatural way, almost as if its head were turning upside down. David heard its neck bones pop and crack, and he thought he understood.

All this way, he thought, for nothing.

The cold, gelatinous substance stretched out over his left eye. With a sucking, squelching sound, it dragged David into the throne room floor and down, down, down.


	12. The Clock and the Orb

**12. The Clock and The Orb**

**T**here were stairs above him, their steps facing him as he stood on another stair. A viscous lump of whatever that slimy creature had been made of slid off his cheek and splattered on the stairs above him. David watched it with growing concern. If the stairs were above him, and the disgusting goop sliding off his skin was falling down towards them, then that would mean he was—David's heart attempted to escape through his mouth at this thought—upside down.

Within the space of a yelp and a lunge for the nearest wall, David found himself slipping off his stair and landing, on his feet, on another one. And he was still right side up, and there were still stairs above him and at every direction and angle he could look at. He found himself stepping back, thoroughly disoriented, only to find he had somehow walked right into a stair that had been across from him, to the left, and tilted.

"How am I doing this?" he said, voice rising in panic even as he continued walking. "How am I doing this? Stop, David, for God's _sake_. How are you doing this?!"

He looked down at a set of stairs that met at a door. He dearly wanted to just jump off from his current stair, land on the spot where the ones below met, and go through that door, but he could not figure out how. He tried simply jumping, only to find himself on some random marble stair he had not even been able to see from his previous spot. The door was now several feet away, and above him. Upside down.

"Damn this place, damn this place, damn this place."

He would not run. He felt he knew enough about The Labyrinth's screwy sense of direction to understand that it wanted you to run precisely because it would lead you nowhere. But jumping was not producing any positive effects, and neither was simply walking—other than causing David to gasp out pointless Briticisms in panic. He got through three stairs muttering, "Oh jolly good" and "Hullo hullo!" and "Tally ho, then!" before he wanted to slap himself.

Finally, he simply sat down. It was nothing but stairs below and above and to each side of him, with the elusive door somewhere in the vanishing distance. David dropped his head into his hands, eyes shut tight. Then, palms still pressed against his eyes, he stood up and walked off the side of the stair, not up or down it.

Gravity gathered at his navel, seeming to suck away all the contents of his body, and he could only dare to hope that he had done something right.

He landed with an electric jolt up his left elbow and a renewed gasp of pain from his ankle. He lay still for a while, waiting for the swirling mass of white pops and flashes to clear from behind his eyelids and for his centre of gravity to cease pretending as if it were on a heaving carnival ride.

"No more nasty landings," he murmured against cool stone. He tasted blood. His breath smelled foul. "Please. No more. It hurts. I hurt. My God, I hurt…"

He opened his eyes to darkness broken by a faint blue glow. It reminded David of lying on the living room floor when he was just a kid, a seat cushion propped up beneath him, the room dyed a flat, winter blue as Benny Hill cracked jokes on the tellie. It was a comforting thought, and he could almost feel the coffee table just behind his feet, could swear Mum was just around the corner, coming to tell him off for sneaking out of bed again.

David turned his head towards the glow and pushed his memories firmly away. For all he knew, he had been sent to die in this place, and he hoped to meet death with his mind firmly upon it. He did not, after all, believe in the supernatural. His parents would not sense his goodbyes. He believed only in what he could see and touch and hear and smell, as he could goblins and The Labyrinth.

With a grunt, he pushed himself off the ground and into a half-kneeling position. He pushed back his hair, looping it behind his ears and combing his fingers through it. Next, he straightened out his leather jacket and the cuffs of his shirt. He made sure it was properly tucked into his trousers before he heaved himself to his feet. He knocked dirt and insect carcasses and traces of goop off his boots.

Then, he walked towards the centre of The Labyrinth.

He cocked his head and waited for his brain to react, but all it wanted to do was catalogue his physical reactions, so that he was merely thinking about thinking that his brain should react. No sense in forcing it, then. He folded his arms over his chest and simply looked at the source of the blue light.

It was an orb, wedged into an upper crevice of an old, wooden clock. The clock's minute and seconds hands moved across its face in silence, the minute hand shuddering in a way that suggested that the clock's gears were in need of greasing. The hour hand was nearly two minutes away from the thirteenth hour.

"It's a pity George will never be able to see this," David said. He could not even bring himself to smile at his words.

He reached out to lift the orb away from the clock. It was slippery and floppy, almost as if David were holding an egg yolk. He found himself turning it this way and that within his palm so that it would not break apart and drip down his fingers. He peeled back his fingers and looked down at an eyeball.

"Oh no. Oh no no, no."

And yet he did not drop it. He heard his own voice, and he knew that something—someone within him—was afraid. But he felt this as if it were happening to the other David Jones, the sleepwalker who had fallen into a maze. That David stood holding an eyeball and he was terrified. But the David actually standing at the centre of The Labyrinth, gazing down at the eyeball resting on his hand, was calm. He merely observed as he rolled the eyeball toward his fingertips, so that he pinched it between thumb and index finger and brought it up level with his face.

Its iris was blue. David looked at it for a while, then, with care and patience, he brought it slowly toward his damaged left eye. He shut his right eye and found himself peering out into a world tinged in silver blue, like looking out through coloured glass. His body tensed, and then the geography and physical reality of his mind fell away.

He saw his hands, tinged green and criss-crossed with blood, grasping a spear. He saw a gold-tinged waste that spread out in chaotic emptiness. He saw his hand as he bent down to pick up a stone, felt the stone breathe and sigh beneath his touch. Images formed and fell and crumbled and blurred and crawled by and leapt forward with a sideways yank. A moon pale woman with long black hair, stepping from and receding into and part of the darkness of a—the faces of his soldiers, muddied and crusted with blood and disfigured as they waited for—a door made of birch wood—the bottom of a well choked with leaves whose skin had faded to transparent networks of veins and—stars that were not stars, but creatures much older than himself and they said—a moment of pure vacuum, and himself hanging in it, looking around—his fingers as they closed around a white brick and carried it toward the crest of a hill. He saw his hand lay the brick upon the ground, felt the importance of the ceremony, the heat of the crowd behind him as he set down the cornerstone of The Labyrinth. He saw it all. He saw everything.

David dropped the eyeball.

And then he began to scream.

* * *

Once upon a time there lived a king named Jareth. He had led his people in battle many months ago, and now they lived upon an empty wasteland, squatters in army tents and makeshift huts. All around him he could hear the howls and shrieks of their enemies, prowling the borders of lands that had, after all, no clear boundaries. Only Jareth's magic held them at bay, and it cost him much. Jareth was weakening, and would soon be unable to protect his people.

And so Jareth gathered a small amount of power from the dreams of a human child who feared the creatures that lived in the woods behind his family's hut, and he picked up a stone. He ran his fingers across it in a caress, as a father caresses the cheek of his infant daughter so that she may wake. The stone stirred to life within his palm, and he whispered to it of foundations and walls and homes and a place to call their own. The stone replied in the voice of the earth beneath Jareth's feet. "Yes, I will do this thing." And Jareth smiled. He gathered his people and promised them safety and peace and growth and, with only his belief and the trust and yearning of his people as ceremony, he lay down the first stone of their new home.

To protect their home, he built high walls, and then broke the walls into zigzagging patterns, each one more dense and convoluted than the last. He murmured to the stones and the earth and the trees, and they spread out in ever-tightening mazes and pitfalls and traps. He assigned guards and sentries, staff and servants, so that his labyrinth could be well protected, as it in turn protected his people.

Jareth drank in the pulse of the labyrinth as it stirred fully awake. He still spoke to it, requested expansions and buffered its corners with strong magic. Soon, the labyrinth had developed a will of its own, and it continued Jareth's work without the need of his having to ask. Protect the city, protect the castle, and protect the king. That was its purpose, and it needed nothing more.

And Jareth's people were safe, and they had peace and they were happy. The years passed, and Jareth passed with them.

His successors inherited a world that barely needed them. They ruled and they passed laws and settled disputes and appointed maintenance crews to the farthest regions of The Labyrinth. Ten Kings Jareth watched as goblins began to keep almost exclusively to the city within gates they themselves erected, crude, large things protected by sentinels from a bygone era. They watched, not with disinterest, but without much concern, as myriads of creatures settled into and developed within The Labyrinth. They were tested every now and then, prodded for their loyalty, then left alone once it became clear that as long as they were left in peace, they could care less what the goblins and their king did or did not do.

And this suited the first ten Kings Jareth just fine.

But the eleventh King Jareth realized the folly of The Labyrinth. His people were safe within their city, growing ever more foolish and witless as the years dragged on. They lived in a stagnant world, protected—cut off—from everything outside. Nothing could reach King Jareth, and nothing wanted to.

King Jareth was lonely.

So, one cloudless night, he pushed open the birch door that led to the bowels of the castle. He descended into an empty room, and he summoned a portal. It drained him to do so. Humans barely believed in goblins anymore. His people had become a joke, plastic dolls and silly mascots for synthetically flavoured cereals, Hallowe'en masks without any real sense of the power of the rituals they had subverted into ridiculous holidays. But he found the dreams of a bearded man bent over an illustrator's table, sketching out fairies and gnomes and, finally, a king for the goblins, a tall and regal figure dressed in night, and Jareth held the strands of that dream between his fingertips, and the portal widened into life.

The human world waited beyond. A world with no boundaries, and no protection.

As a safeguard to his decision—a selfish and flawed one, he knew, with little remorse—he reached up and plucked out his left eye. This he left behind. Then he spread his arms and they were the wings of a common, white barn owl. And he left The Labyrinth.

But he had no desire to remain a common barn owl. It was interesting at first, but soon became mindless and tiresome. He circled above the country whose dreams had chiefly shaped The Labyrinth, and—with a perverse sense of random chance—he swooped down upon the first corner of the land his eyes landed upon. It was a place called Kent, a suburb of the sprawling city of London, full of everyday, perfectly ordinary English people. Nothing exciting about them at all, just as there was nothing exciting about Margaret Weddell or her new husband, Haywood Jones. Perfectly ordinary people living in perfectly ordinary Kent, with the war the humans called The Great War—as if no war had been worthy of them before—raining down in a series of minor, day-to-day inconveniences around their suburban home.

Jareth waited for the war to end—too much noise—and then he stripped his form down to nothing but the thought of a thought, and he burrowed deep within the mind of Margaret's newborn son.

And then he lay still, content to observe, and he waited for the moment when this perfectly ordinary human world would begin to bore him.

It bored him within thirty years.

Jareth decided it was time to go home. He had been away for far too long.


	13. King Jareth

**13. King Jareth**

**H**oggle sat at an outdoor bench at an ale house across from the castle. What they demanded in payment—just because they had a spectacular view of the castle—was enough to make a dwarf want to swing a pickaxe at someone, preferably the owner. But their swill was undeniably the best in the city, and Hoggle did not feel like some piss poor brew at the cheaper spots. He handed the barmaid a medium sized ruby, and weaved his way outside with his first mug.

David was still inside the castle. Hoggle took a long drink of ale. "Hope you found what you were looking for, kid." He gulped down more of his drink. "And not whatever was looking for you." Hoggle scowled at his words. He finished off his ale in one sour go, and motioned for a third one. "Had my orders," he muttered at the froth of his new drink. "The Labyrinth wanted him. I'll be damned if I know why. But I had my orders, see? And I followed my orders. I stayed. I stayed…" His shoulders slumped.

"I should have stayed by his side."

The tallest castle tower loomed over Hoggle, like a huge finger, pointed at him as the other towers tut-tutted, the whole building seeming to shake its head in disappointment. Maybe it was just the ale. Hoggle scowled at the tower, until it stood still once more. "What did you want me to do, huh?" he growled at it over his drink. "You said lead him to the right maze, the good maze, and I _did._" His eyes dropped to the table. "And I knew I was doing something wrong. I just knew it. Blast me for a dunderheaded dwarf."

He drained his ale. The table rattled as he slammed his mug down, rising to his feet. "Right, then. Hang on, David, kid. Hoggle's going in there, whether this place likes it or not."

Getting in was a breeze. Pŭnsch was a nice guy, very proper and hard working and all that, but he had only been at the job for the last forty-five years. There were doors and cracks and fissures only the oldies knew about anymore. And, granted, Hoggle was pretty young by Labyrinth standards, but he hadn't spent three hundred years at his job for nothing. He knew a thing or two about the castle.

He paused before he wriggled in through a lopsided hole on the back wall facing a courtyard. "I'm sorry, boss. I know you want me to obey this place without question, but I ain't leaving that kid. He's a good kid. Don't be too angry, boss, if you ever come back." Then he shoved himself inside.

The castle was a dump. Last time he had seen it, it had been so clean and white that it had nearly given him a headache. Now it was just dust and filth as far as Hoggle cared to look. Some no-good cretins had stolen all the furniture too. A lot of it had been really valuable, and Hoggle hated to think of the boss's armchairs in some goblin hovel, probably shoved out into the street in pieces by now.

Hoggle's face closely resembled a tornado about to swallow an entire town by the time he had stomped his fist-clenched way up to the throne room.

"Disgrace," he grumbled, deep within his throat. "Owls take their eyes."

His brain had been just about to take him from eye-pecking owls to the realization that he really had no way of knowing whether David was in the throne room, when the room itself solved the problem for him.

David was sitting on the throne.

"Stew my mam's knickers," Hoggle murmured. "You're alive."

David cocked his head to the side, cheek resting against the curled fingers of his hand. He ran the tip of his pinkie over his lower lip in a distracted manner. His eyes moved from the tip of Hoggle's battered, red leather cap to the dusty overalls of The Labyrinth Maintenance Detail and down to his cracked and warped work shoes. Hoggle felt as filthy and as derelict as the castle.

And there was something wrong. There was something devastatingly wrong.

"David…?"

The man sitting on the throne, the man who had David's body and David's clothes and David's face, raised his eyebrows at that name. His voice was soft and incredulous in a way that made it seem as if the very act of talking bored him. "Oh," he said. "Was that his name? I did try to remember, but so many other memories were vying for attention that it simply didn't seem important." He curled up his pinkie and switched to tapping one high cheekbone with his index finger. "Hello, Hoggle, by the by."

Hoggle's lungs felt heavy. "David?"

"No," the man said with a lazy smile. "Try again."

"B-boss…?"

The man crossed one leg. "Your highness, Hoggle. Or your majesty. Either one is fine."

"What have you done to David?"

"I haven't done anything to David. There was nothing for me to do with David. He was, in a way, little more than a suit of armour." He looked down at his pathetic excuse for a leather jacket. "Well, a rather shabby coat, if anything. I've cast him aside. The bothersome parts, anyway. I rather like his shape. Don't you?"

"But… but you…" Hoggle clenched and unclenched his fists. "Jareth," he said at last, as if the name were too heavy to hold in his mouth for much longer. "You were the kid? David was a good kid."

"David was a rather nice overcoat," Jareth said. He stood up and walked over to a window, hands clasped behind his back. He rubbed the bottom edge of his palm against the glass pane and pretended to peer out at the scenery below. His eyes, Hoggle could see, were watching the reflection of the room behind him. He was gauging Hoggle's reaction. "And I was not David. I was within David, waiting. The Labyrinth recognized me even outside, in the human world. And, since it is its duty to protect the goblins and the city and to protect me, it did just that, in its own fashion."

"It drew David here," Hoggle said, the words hushed as the truth began to solidify within his mind. "And it ordered me to take him to the first, true maze…"

"Not David, Hoggle. Me. The Labyrinth knew I needed to return, that I wanted to return, even if that cheap suit David was too feeble minded to figure it out." He snorted out a quiet laugh. "That's not entirely fair, though. How could he know? I didn't want to know. I had been having rather a nice time outside, above ground, before his little band started to fizzle."

"David was—"

"Oh, cut it out, Hoggle," Jareth snapped. "This is unworthy of you, and it's tiresome." The sleepy look was gone from his face, replaced by an impatient haughtiness Hoggle could no longer pretend he did not recognize. He spoke with David's voice and through David's face, but this was Jareth.

He had returned, just as Hoggle had been telling everyone for the last thirty years. Proud, loyal Hoggle, steadfast and true as he waited for the king to return. His boss.

His boss had been a goblin somewhat taller than the rest, with blue eyes and grey hair pulled back into a simple ponytail. He had a flat nose, as if someone had broken it in a childhood fight, set in a square and homely face. He was beginning to get on in years, and the youthful, rounded planes of his face were aging into sharper edges and networks of wrinkles. They suited the boss. He had been an eccentric goblin, dreamy and given to bouts of melancholy, when he would gaze out at The Labyrinth from this very throne room with a sad, distant look upon his face, but he had been the boss. When he said, "Hoggle, that fence near The Giggling Side Alley needs mending, don't you think?" Hoggle was on it before a goblin child could burp. And the boss could be impatient, yes, and infuriating sometimes (he kept proposing projects he forgot about, among other things), and he did not take kindly to insubordination, but he was still the boss. And Hoggle would have walked into the outside world and gotten himself run over by some mad human contraption for him.

The man wearing David's body and calling himself Jareth was not the boss.

He wiped clean a wider spot in the window and stood looking at his reflection, studying it from every angle. He held down his lower eyelid and peered at his dilated left pupil and tutted. Then he drew back his lips, eyebrows shooting up in alarm as he took in the sorry state of David's crooked, yellowed English choppers. He reached out to touch his hair and shuddered at the traces of mud and slime, goop, cobwebs and twigs jammed into it.

"What's happened to you?" Hoggle said, keeping several weary feet away from Jareth.

Jareth turned, fingers hovering over his hair. "What's happened to me? Isn't it obvious? I've been dragged through the mud all the way to Goblin City. I'm disgusting." He began to comb his fingers through his hair, starting out with his palms flat against the crown of his head and down to the tips. He repeated the motion three times, and with each successive stroke dirt sprinkled to the ground as sand, a few twigs and pebbles here and there. Jareth's hair lightened as well, passing from David's mousy brown to a warm blond. He tugged at the tips and they lengthened out, until they came to rest at his shoulders. He turned to the window and admired his handiwork. His hair was now blond and straight and longer and very, very clean.

"This will do nicely." He flicked one lock of hair behind his ear. "Hoggle, walk with me."

"I won't."

"Hoggle, you are bound to me. I am your king. And you will walk with me."

"I came here looking for David," Hoggle said, strangely calm. "And you're not David. You're not even _him_."

"You have been loyal to me, Hoggle. When everybody else abandoned this castle, and their posts, you remained. Therefore, I shall forgive you your insolence." Jareth snapped his fingers. "Now. Walk with me."

Hoggle had no choice. His legs began moving without his say-so. Grumbling, he followed after Jareth. They descended from the throne room tower, Jareth with purposeful, autocratic steps, Hoggle with the jerking, put-upon drag of those with bewitched feet.

As they moved from room to room, Jareth tutted and sighed and murmured, "Good Lord." Hoggle caught a thickly accented, "Bloody blazes," and it hurt his heart.

"Where are we going?" he said.

"I have some minor things to tidy up before I resume my reign," Jareth said.

He strode up to the main gates and placed the palm of his right hand on the wood. "Here we are," he said. "This is number one." He took a deep breath, drew back his arm, and then brought it down with resounding slap upon the door.

"You are a _sorry_ excuse for a gate! Groaning and gasping. I could hear you all the way within that wretched David. Shape up! Right this minute. I want you clean and oiled and burnished and…" He pursed his lips in consideration. "And a good ten feet taller, five feet wider. Grander. You are the door to the goblin king's castle. Behave like it."

With a sheepish rasp of wood, the gates obliged. Jareth nodded, then moved to snap at the windows. They burst upwards and sideways and replaced the thin, dirty glass of before with heavy, quality glass decorated here and there by whorls within its body. Stained glass tinkled out above, before it tinkled right back into nothingness.

"Too twee," Jareth said. He waved his hand dismissively at the windows' attempt to become pointed, Gothic monstrosities, and they warped back into sensible rectangles, though considerably taller than before. "May just go for a more Romanesque feel later on," Jareth said, moving on.

Hoggle glared at the windows in resentment. "Aren't you going to clean this place as well? Magic up some furniture?"

"That comes later. Gates, open! _Slowly_. I'm walking out, not running from a flood. Yes, that's good. Nice and stately. There's only one thing missing."

With a snap of his fingers, Jareth released Hoggle's feet. Then, he began to flap and dust off his shabby leather jacket. As his hands patted their way down it, the coat lengthened and mended itself, rippling and billowing from leather to linen and silk. Jareth shook out his legs and David's trusty boots—now nearly sole-less and covered in holes—became real leather, brown and snug up to below his knees. He turned his feet this way and that, pleased, as he smoothed his jeans into black linen pants. He brushed his new coat a few times, pausing to button it nearly up to his chin, and it rippled from the deep blues right after sunset to the polished silver of bicycle handlebars and finally into the bruised red of ripe cherries. Jareth reached into its smart, perfectly tailored sleeves and pulled out starched black cuffs.

"There."

Hoggle stared. "What's _happened_ to you?"

Jareth smiled, then walked out.

The goblin in rusted armour clattered up to him. "Halt! Identify yourself! No one may enter without—" He looked at the castle gates behind Jareth, then at Hoggle and, finally, up at Jareth's face. His swallow echoed within his helmet. "Terribly sorry, your majesty. Force of habit. Been pulling nights this week. Terribly sorry, your highness." He lowered his spear and stood at attention. "Good to see you again, your highness, sir!" He saluted.

"Are you mad?" Hoggle said. "Does that _look _like King Jareth to you?"

Jareth spoke in a soft, authoritative voice. "I _am _the king, Hoggle. Please come to terms with that soon."

To Pŭnsch he said, "You nearly blocked me from entering the castle."

"Sir?"

"You came to your senses, near the end, but you nearly stopped me."

"N-no, sir, your majesty. I…" Pŭnsch stood in a nervous rattle of armour. If he confessed to having waved that dirty fellow from Kent through, it would cost him his job. But King Jareth was accusing him of denying him entry. Serious, governmental business, that. Crown affairs. Only Pŭnsch had not seen King Jareth in rather a long time, let alone coming up to the castle gates. He went in and out through other, secret means was the word around the soldier's mess hall. "I would never deny you entry, your highness. I beg—"

"Don't beg," Jareth said. He favoured a random spot in the distance with a thoughtful look. "Pŭnsch," he said at length. The poor guard could barely stutter out a, "Yes, sir?" Jareth looked down at him, as if considering the goblin's size and weight and relative height. "The Security Detail around The Grumbling Wastes has been unproductively thin of late. Not surprising. It's a miserable place. Why don't you go there?"

With a whistle of wind and an echoing, flabbergasted yelp, Pŭnsch banished.

Jareth dusted off perfectly clean hands, brushing himself out some black gloves in the process. "There. That's number two. Now," he snapped his fingers, and Hoggle was forced to trail behind him once more, back into the castle.

"You don't need me," Hoggle protested. "Why are you doing this?"

Jareth said nothing. An odd look crossed his face, something like incomprehension and betrayal, but Hoggle could not be certain. He thought he had seen David in that look, but he knew that was only wishful thinking.

"I want you here," Jareth said. "It's fitting that a king have a loyal ally."

"I'm not—"

Jareth raised a hand to silence him. Hoggle's lips pressed together, quite against his will. He tried to grumble with his mouth closed, but his tongue pressed itself against his front teeth. Hoggle was forced to take deep breaths through his nose.

"Now," Jareth said, "I settle a score."

He walked forward, and the castle walls fell away all around him, sliding down into the ground like mirrors. Some of them shattered, shards and powdered glass drifting upwards like astral bodies suspended within the Milky Way. Hoggle stared down in a panic as his feet continued moving across black nothingness. Jareth walked ahead, his red coat billowing out in silk and linen and russet feathers.

He stopped in front of an old, wooden clock. He took up the orb nestled along its top. It glowed a weak, light blue, like the sky at high noon, inconsequential as a backdrop to the clouds and sun. Jareth closed both hands around the orb, and Hoggle heard it implode and shatter. He drew in a sharp breath as he saw blood drip down from between Jareth's fingers.

Jareth stood, head slightly bent, not looking at anything. His eyes were bright and tense.

"Come out," he said. His voice filled the entire room, even as it never rose above a soft cadence. "Sankrėl."

A white owl screeched and swooped down from above. It shot past Jareth's head, so that his hair and coat snapped and drifted forward in its wake. It landed, talons curled, atop the clock. It regarded Jareth with disdain, then took flight once more. It dove toward Hoggle, but turned at the last minute, coming to rest upon the black emptiness to Jareth's left. There, it shrugged its shoulders, so that its bones seemed to be trying to break through its skin. They bulged and shifted within its body, its head dropping back, until the owl had been shaken off and a bent, ancient creature stood in its place.

Its sightless eyes turned towards Jareth.

"So," Sankrėl said. "The traitor… has returned."


	14. Magic

**14. Magic**

"**I** did not… expect you to return," Sankrėl said. He shook out one clawed hand, and a bone walking stick appeared before him. He leaned into it, looking for all the old like a stern schoolmaster lecturing an unruly student. "I suppose you think… I am grateful."

"No," Jareth said. He crossed one arm over his stomach, the elbow of his other arm resting on it, index finger keeping thoughtful time against his lower lip. "After my last run-in with you, and that nasty business with the slime, I came to the conclusion that you'd be rather unhappy with my return." He stroked his chin, eyes narrowed in the pretence of deep thought. "I wonder now, could that have been you shifting the castle away from me?"

Sankrėl said nothing.

"Well, it hardly matters, does it?" Jareth said. "Because you failed. And your slime failed to kill me, and you will fail to kill me now, assuming that's what the murderous look on your wrinkled old face means."

"Jareth was a good… king. He loved… his people." Sankrėl gripped the pommel of his walking stick. "You… abandoned us, on a whim. And you…" His film encased eyes swivelled towards Jareth's left eye, and there was such hatred in their lightless depths that Jareth could not suppress an intake of breath. "You… have kept… his form. You have remained within a wretched… _human_… body." He spat at Jareth's feet. Thick, green phlegm splattered against his boot. "You do not… deserve… the name Jareth."

Jareth gazed down at the phlegm marring his new boot. He shook out his foot and made himself new, black boots.

"I _am_ Jareth," he said, a mocking tilt to his voice. "Didn't you know? My parents—rest their goblin souls—named me after our noble, bold, heroic first king. They must've wanted great things for me. I seem to recall mother died before my coronation, but my dear father saw it. And you saw it too, didn't you?"

All this while, Hoggle had stood behind Jareth, unable to move and unable to speak. He had graduated from uncomprehending stares bouncing back and forth between Jareth and the old creature he called Sankrėl to a disbelieving frown at the blackness below him.

Sankrėl had been the second King Jareth. He was dead. Was supposed to be dead. Hoggle did not hold with dead things coming back. Nasty business all around. He was less pleased with the realization that Sankrėl's voice bore an uncanny resemblance to the voice that had ordered Hoggle to lead David out of the first maze. He thought with a pang of David's accusation about flesh eating fairies.

And he felt a deeper, greater pang at the thought that The Labyrinth, which—as did most of its other inhabitants—he had thought of as his own and as a part of him, might just be this warped, blind creature glowering hatred at Jareth.

I refuse to believe that, he thought, eyes shut tight.

"You're very old, Sankrėl," Jareth said. "Much too old. You would give human children nightmares. Which might not be such a bad thing, really, but your continued existence greatly displeases me nonetheless." He waved his left hand at the ancient goblin, and, this time, Hoggle felt the crackle of magic in the air, like fine sand rubbing against his skin. "Why don't you just go?"

Nothing happened. Jareth stared, and Sankrėl's beak cracked open in undisguised pleasure.

"Sorry… to disappoint you… boy."

He brought the tip of his walking stick down with a sharp jab, powdered shards of glass rising up where it struck. The shards gathered together and snaked in a rasping tinkle towards Jareth's feet. A few metres away from him, they dipped down in the darkness. When they re-emerged, they were the gelatinous, cream coloured substance. One tendril wrapped itself around Jareth's right foot.

"Not very original, old man," Jareth said. He gave one impatient jerk to his right leg, even as he shook out his left. The black leather boot on his left foot rippled out into a bright pink, sturdy Wellington boot. Jareth brought it down hard on the goop spreading up his right leg. He kicked and scrapped at it, until it fell away in shards of glass.

Then he pulled off his left glove and tossed it at Sankrėl. It bulged and spread in midair, seeming to sprout rubbery legs and arms. It latched onto Sankrėl's face, its limbs lengthening out so that, within seconds, his face was completely smothered. His claws jerked in the air, seemingly unable to get a hold of the bulging substance.

Sankrėl waved his walking stick in a desperate arch, then pointed it upwards.

The blackness was immediately replaced by a chequered floor. Jareth barely had time to fathom what Sankrėl was planning before the white square he was standing on shot up into the air. In a cascade of tiles, a ceiling spread out above. Jareth threw his arms over his face. Bits of plaster struck the floor as Jareth was slammed into the ceiling. The square sunk back down, and Jareth dropped to the floor.

He wiped blood from the corner of his mouth, then bared his teeth in a savage smile. He shook his arms out to the side, and the chequered floor fell away. Tiles crashed and splintered below him, a great cloud of dust and debris rumbling and yawning out to engulf him.

Hoggle pressed his palms against his eyes, momentarily very happy for the fact that his mouth was glued shut and therefore safe from gulping in a lungful of dust and tile shards.

If he could holler, he would love to holler, "Jareth, you DOLT!"

But Jareth was having too much fun. He summoned up broken bits of tile and hurled them at Sankrėl, who had at last managed to rip the glove from his face. He swung his walking stick left and right, batting away tiles that were bursting into scaly creatures with rows of needle thin teeth. Some of the creatures found their mark, and Sankrėl wailed in pain as they bit down into his arms and legs. He ripped them off, bright splotches of blood blossoming beneath his white robes, and hurled them right back at Jareth. They slammed into him as disembodied hands, closing over his wrists and ankles. Jareth jerked this way and that in midair, his hair an untidy curtain over his face, eyebrows knotted in concentration as he muttered counter spells at them. Eventually, he managed to transmute the flesh hands into wax, then banged his wrists together to shatter them off. He pulled the ones around his ankles off as two apples. He bit onto one, crushing the other in his free hand. The pulpy remains of the second apple he hurled at Sankrėl, watched as it engulfed the old goblin from head to foot. The first one he simply ate, to Hoggle's astonishment.

The fight went on for a good, long while, magic rippling and bouncing and ricocheting around and against Sankrėl and Jareth. For every spell summoned, another was called upon to counter it. Jareth laughed and dodged a poisonous snake he hurled back as a javelin. It burst half-way through the air in a shower of splinters. Sankrėl panted, his robes bloodied and sweat trickling down into his beak.

"Give up, you old fool," Jareth said. He stood, upside down, on a Byzantine, mosaic ceiling he had constructed mostly for the striking contrast between its golden and lapis lazuli tiles and his own, deep blue clothes and bright red hair. Changing his appearance constantly had been part of his tactics. It made Sankrėl shake with rage, and had served as a lovely distraction. "I'm only getting started, and you look close to a heart attack. Just let me banish you into nothingness. I'm getting tired of this."

"You… will… not…" Sankrėl panted out. He could not even finish, merely waving his hand so that a glass orb appeared before him. He threw back his arm, and the orb raced towards its target.

With a sharp intake of breath, Jareth realized that he was not the target. The orb was headed towards Hoggle. Mosaic tiles dropped down all around him as he dove down. He stretched out one hand, shouting out unintelligible words, and Hoggle felt something that was almost physical shove him backwards. At the same time, Jareth's silencing spell on him was removed. Hoggle gasped, drawing in huge gulps of air. He slammed into a huge, bronze birdcage, his head ringing as its door swung shut. Magic hummed all across Hoggle's skin, and he knew the cage was somehow serving as a shield.

Jareth crashed to a stop against the bars.

Hoggle stared at him. His hair was mousy brown once more, tangled and wet with sweat, hanging down in rivulets. His face looked pinched and tired, dotted with sweat and smudged dirt and bloodied scratches and cuts, something Hoggle had not noticed as he had pranced and laughed in colourful costumes all around Sankrėl. He gave Hoggle a tired smile, rubbing at the shoulder that had taken most of the brunt of his landing.

"Why…?" Hoggle said.

"We're even now," Jareth said.

Sankrėl summoned a wide, wooden tile to stand on. He leaned forward on his walking stick. "You cannot… fool me, Jareth." He stood in silence for a while, steadying his panting breaths. "You… do not care… for us. You left. Spare me… your little show of… concern for that… creature."

"Dwarf," Hoggle said in a dignified voice, at the same time that Jareth said, "Think what you will."

Sankrėl shook his head. He lifted his walking stick high above his head, where he began to swirl it around, as if he were stirring thick air above him.

The blackness below Jareth's feet began to spread open, like a widening tear along fabric, darkness pushing back darkness. Jareth's hands gripped the bars of Hoggle's birdcage, alarm and fear plain on his face as he looked down. Hoggle wanted to grasp his arms, keep him away from whatever that darkness was below him, but a still dread within him told him that nothing could save Jareth from this spell.

"This looks bad," Jareth said. He tried to laugh. The sound came out as a shuddering breath. He could only watch—and Hoggle with him—as the darkness rose up his feet and his lower legs, swallowing and erasing him as it went. His thighs disappeared, then his hips and his belly. Soon only his shoulders and his head remained. He gave Hoggle a rueful, resigned grin.

"Jareth…" Hoggle said.

Silently, impassively, the darkness closed over Jareth's face.

Hoggle turned to glare at Sankrėl. But he was gone as well.

"No! You can't do that! Where did you go?! Both of you!" Hoggle rattled the bars of his cage. "Curse you! BOTH OF YOU!" He slammed his fists against the sides of the cage. There were tears stumbling down his cheeks, but he did not care. David was gone, and now Jareth was gone too. "You STUPID, _stupid_ Jareth! Damn you, you bas—"

A rush of air crusted in powdered glass swept Hoggle violently towards the other end of the cage. When he picked himself up, rubbing dust out of his eyes in angry jerks of his hands, he saw that what had knocked him over had been Jareth ripping open the darkness once more.

He was restraining a white owl. One hand kept a tight grip on its legs, while the other gripped its neck. The owl hooted and jerked, its wings flapping and striking at Jareth's face. White feathers rose and fell all around them. Jareth's face was covered in talon scratches, and one sleeve hung down in a wide rent, blood shining wet and red underneath.

"Hoggle," Jareth said, calm as anything, "you may want to close your eyes now. This is either going to be really bright, or terribly unpleasant. Either way, it's not something I feel you should be looking at."

"Don't do me any favours," Hoggle muttered. But he closed his eyes.

He heard the owl struggling, its hoots rising to a frantic pitch. Then the darkness behind his eyelids exploded into a bluish white light. A wet, hot something splattered against Hoggle's nose, more of it striking the birdcage with a sickening, pinging squelch. Hoggle's stomach tried to clamber up his throat.

Jareth's voice came to him in a low tut of annoyance. Then, with impossible cheerfulness, "Woops. I guess it was really bright _and _disturbingly disgusting. Should've closed my own eyes. Good Lord, the nightmares. Eyes still closed, Hoggle?"

"I ain't opening them!"

"Well you can now."

Rumbling curses, Hoggle cracked open one eye. He trained it on the tip of his nose. Nothing. He opened his other eye. Still nothing at the end of his nose. He looked around him, and couldn't find any trace of the owl. He sagged in relief, one hand pressed over his heart. His heart did a wonderful cartwheel within his chest as Jareth removed the birdcage.

"Stop doing that!"

"Oh?" Jareth said. The blackness shot upwards with dizzying speed, the walls and floor and ceiling of the castle coming in behind it like the reel of a sped-up film. "I thought you'd prefer to be out of it."

Hoggle straightened out his leather cap. He fixed the floor with a weary look. "Is he… gone?"

"Quite gone. Old bastard still had a hold on this place." He looked thoughtfully at Hoggle, seeming to struggle with something, then shrugged. "Guess I owe you an apology for the fairies. For all of it, really. Sankrėl was a very powerful goblin. It's hardly your fault he fooled you into believing he was The Labyrinth."

"So, The Labyrinth…?"

"Is still The Labyrinth." He raised his eyebrows in polite incomprehension at Hoggle's obvious and somewhat maudlin relief at his words. He supposed he would never get used to the sight of tears trickling down the dwarf's bulbous nose. "Yes, well, and that's all good."

They passed on from the throne room in silence. It was almost an amiable silence, and Hoggle wondered if maybe Jareth's previous attitude had been nothing but bravado before facing Sankrėl. He shot him sideway glances every now and then, as if he could catch a glimpse of Jareth's true personality in between the blond hair and the high-collared, black leather suit he wore at the moment and the traces of powdered glass that never seemed to leave him now.

But Jareth never looked at him, merely strode on to the main gates again. He flapped both arms in front of him, and the rectangle windows to either side of the gates shifted and deepened in a scrape and roll of heavy stone, arching along the top and receding towards thick glass in deeply cut grooves.

"Romanesque," Jareth said.

Then he gestured the gates open.

It was time to face his people.


	15. Hoggle's Decision

**Notes: **With the exception of the addition of a British accent, Wrim is Peter Dinklage in my mind. Because Dinklage rules.

* * *

**15. Hoggle's Decision **

**M**any years later, when learned goblin historians described the events leading to the return of King Jareth, that he was (had been) human and not a goblin at all barely merited a mention. What the crowd at Goblin City remembered, what was told to countless goblin children and recounted over hundreds of ales and over clothes lines by the thousands was were every member of the city had been when they had seen him climb onto the fountain.

"I'd jest been emptying me chamber pot," Gruwella liked to tell her neighbour. "An' I chance to look up at the fountain, an' there 'e was, sharp as you please. Walkin' on air, 'e was, an' so I knew it were important."

Thock had been a good three miles from the fountain. He ordered the first round of stout Ogre beers for the men of The Security Detail and had just turned to ask Crumski the One Eyed if he had heard from Pŭnsch that afternoon, when he stood up with sudden, clear purpose and said, "You know, we should drink these by the fountain."

"I felt oddly compelled to be there, you know?" This was something a great deal many who had been there could agree on.

Supper, work, drinks, sweethearts, the need to sock your neighbour a good one for failure to tie up their goat ("T'aint mine, ye great oaf, it's me neighbours!"), all was forgotten as it became imperative that everyone gather around the fountain. Younger, fitter goblins clambered onto roofs and lamp posts. Children and girlfriends were hoisted onto shoulders. Academes trained telescopes on the sight. Mathematicians and those employed by The Goblin City Committee to The Census Committee suffered near paraplegic attacks at the first chance in decades to properly count everyone. Everyone not counting was staring in rapt attention at the figure standing on the fountain's tallest water spout.

The details got a bit muddled, but nearly everyone could agree that he was pretty tall and, really, much too thin. Everything else passed onto the untrustworthy hands of eyewitness accounts. Depending on whom you asked, he was dressed in anything from a pollen yellow jumpsuit to an ink blue frock coat to black leather straps from chin to toes to a cape made of robin feathers. "Mella said he were naked," one elderly goblin said. "Armour," maintained the cobbler. "He had the pointiest boots I'd ever seen," said the butcher's delivery girl. Her boss swore to his grave that he wore fur boots, with red tassels.

"Do you remember what he said?" asked a history student, hard at work on an oral and written history of The Labyrinth that—due to a misunderstanding of the correct filing order of the letter cabinets—never found its way out of the printers. "What were his opening words?"

"Well, now, I suppose he must've introduced himself, dear."

Hands held aloft. Or maybe folded across his chest. No, no, definitely at least one arm pointed above him. "My people! Goblins! "You, all of you!" Something like that. "I am King Jareth!"

"I's pretty sure that's wot 'e said," grumbled a stooped grandfather.

"Grandpa, honestly," his teenage daughter said, exasperated. "He wos a great deal more genteel'an that." She fixed a lamp post with a dreamy, besotted face. "I am Jareth, he said, all proper an' gentlemanly, and I am your king, if you'll have me. He was so… dapper."

"Dapper? He had an odd nose, is what. Foreign. Said a great deal of nothing. But he looked good, put on a good show. Young folk like that."

He said wonderful things. He spoke of pride and change and a better tomorrow, of what Goblin City had been and could be again. The goblins old enough to remember the glory days nodded. The young, sick with anger at the squalor, wanted to pump their fists. Even the ones who still had no clue what in blazes they were gathered around the fountain for cheered. "You got any idear wot that pom's sayin'?" Some goblins had not a bloody clue. Others scoffed or pointed or flashed toothy grins. "The king's come back, you dolt. That's King Jareth up there!"

"Can you pipe down over there? He's talking."

He talked a great deal. He talked history at them. He talked humans and power at them. He spoke of demons and the creative power of fear and he spoke of the need for humans to fear them once more, just as they feared demons.

"He said," a young goblin said, nursing a cup of black sludge, "he said that humans had forgotten how to fear goblins, yeah? And he was right, you know? It's true. I've read about it. He said a lot of stuff, man, a lot of deep stuff." He took quick slurps of his hot swill. "Yeah, man. Fear. He was, like, so deep."

"Knows the value of the old ways," a thousand year old said. "Used to be we haunted their woods, stole their babes and wrecked havoc with their crops. Sharp young man, that one. Don't see that nowadays."

"I'm for it," a housewife said. "It's the children what have suffered all these years, and I'm for anyone who could change things."

"Oh, great owls, he looked _straight _at me an' Zle said, nohuh, he totally looked at me but no _way _'cause he was lookin' right at me and—ooh mum'll hate this—but I am so goin' to join whatever he wants me to join. He said he, like, needed all of us an' he looked so _gorgeous _and—"

"—yeah, anyone can look pretty and talk pretty," a goblin girl said as she sat on her neighbour's chimney, "but what he said made sense. Look, I've got a little brother who can't tell a door from a bed. I know what goblin degeneration looks like. This guy, this Jareth, he wants us to bleed into human consciousness again, to regain our power, to grow in number. Not even nan remembers the last king who spoke that way. This is real."

At the ale house across from the castle, Wrim nursed a warm beer and watched the crowd—as a sensible dwarf, he owed it to himself not to press in with them—as they either hung onto every word that bloke up on the fountain said, or hollered for someone to tell them what they thought the bloke was saying. Wrim himself could only make out a few words, most of them "future" or "once more," followed by cheers.

He jerked his head in the direction of the fountain. "Ain't that something, Hoggle?"

Hoggle drank his beer and pretended not to notice the crowd.

"Hey," Wrim said, "you reckon that mate'a yours is out in that crowd? You still want I should put 'im up?"

"He's not coming," Hoggle said after a while. "He never made it out of The Labyrinth."

"Poor bugger," Wrim grunted. "Got himself sucked down by something, did 'e?"

"Fell in with a bad crowd. Got his head full of nonsense." Hoggle pushed away his beer mug and stood to go. "Weren't my friend, anyway."

Wrim was not paying attention. He sat with his face towards the direction of the fountain, a half smile on his face as the bloke hoisted another part of his speech up on, "This is what we could have been, what we shall be again!" Claps and cheers buffeted the air, like ammunition from celebratory canons.

"Ain't that something?" Wrim said. Hoggle left him like that, a smile on his face and beer mug forgotten. "Ain't that just something?"

There was no accounting for goblin loyalty. Jareth had it all cut out for himself when it came to that. They would follow him like lemurs to a cliff. And that was their own damn business, and Hoggle could not wait to be out of it.

"Hail King Jareth!" a young goblin shouted, waving his yellow coat above his head. His friends waved caps and scarves. "Long live the Goblin King!"

"Goblin King," Hoggle muttered. "Phaugh. He's not even a goblin. Just a fraud leading fools."

* * *

King Jareth sat by himself at the edges of The Labyrinth, reclining on the branches of a tree as old as the first stone of Goblin City. An eternal sunset saturated the clouds and the sky above him, drenching the wastes beyond The Labyrinth in the rusted, decayed browns and creams of late autumn. Jareth rolled and tasted the word autumn in his head. It was not a word that had any meaning within The Labyrinth. This was something from before, from the part of him that had walked the human world.

Sunset. Autumn. Goblins had no use for those terms in The Labyrinth, where time and, therefore, seasons, had no meaning. He supposed he would stop using them as well, after a while.

Reclaiming the throne had been almost laughable. He had sauntered forward from the gates, one foot higher from the ground with every step he took, until he had touched down upon a water spout in a shower of powdered glass and a flared coat like an oil slick, iridescent and of a colour no one could pin-point. He could have told them the story of The Three Little Pigs and they would have cheered. Most likely. A few glared at him, and some never managed to rub glass particles out of their eyes, and kept bumping into the fountain, but—in the end—they had all cheered and some excitable girls and guys (there were words he never dreamed he would attach to goblins) had kicked off a chant, "Long live the Goblin King!" It had swayed and drifted like strands of seaweed over the crowd, sinking into their depths and gathering force until it had rolled forward and crashed into him. He was pretty certain he had struck a politician's pose at that point, something he had seen on the tellie once, arms above his head, chin tilted and a look of determination and populist optimism on his face.

Tellie. Politician. Populist. More words from the human world. He floated them in his mind's eye, like encased flies on a web, then pushed them away.

Hoggle had been at his side before he stepped out, that he remembered as well.

"Do I have your loyalty?" Jareth said, eyes scanning the aimless crowd he was about to face.

"Loyalty?" Hoggle's eyebrows knotted over his eyes in grey, bushy clumps. "Was that what that birdcage was all about? Just some ploy to impress me? Loyalty…"

"You saved my life. You never abandoned your post. I have now saved your life, and I would have you as my advisor."

He had expected Hoggle to be pleased. Instead, the dwarf had shot him an incredulous stare that crumpled away to harsh, flinty laughter. "Hoggle, an advisor? That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard!"

"It is a great hono—"

"Keep the honour. As you said, we're even now. One life for another." He shoved his hands into his pockets. "Nah, you keep your honour and your palace staff and all that. I'm gonna go have a beer. Fluorescent pixies know I need one after today."

He had not seen Hoggle again since then.

A goblin with large, translucent ears and a beak surrounded by a fringe of fine, honeyed feathers had offered himself as a candidate for palace staff after his speech atop the fountain. "I come well recommended," he had said, in clipped, professional tones that had made Jareth smile in spite of himself. "I have impeccable references and served as adjunct secretary to the Goblin City Public Works Commission under the ninth King Jareth, sir. I am sure that I would be most helpful in his majesty's transitionary period."

Jareth listened to him politely, then asked, "What's your name?"

The goblin coughed delicately. "Pam, your majesty."

He should have known. He drew his gloved hand down through the air, the front facing Pam, and the goblin's shabby suit mended and dyed itself black. Jareth flicked his fingers and handed Pam a seal of office. "You are my advisor now, Pam. I expect you to report for duty immediately upon my summons."

Pam bowed, grave and officious. Hoggle could never have done that. "So, what's next, boss?" he would have said, rolling his sleeves back. "Let's get this shindig moving."

Jareth tutted away those thoughts and turned his attention back to the horizon line beyond him.

His hands lay on his lap, clasped together. They were still cut and bruised, although no longer covered in blood and dust and gore. He turned his palms over. He counted ten individual wounds where the shards of the orb that was (had been) his left eye had ripped through his gloves and sunk in. Talon gashes surrounded them, criss-crossing arcs of red lightning.

Sankrėl. Poor bastard. Poor, deluded bastard. He had only thought to protect The Labyrinth, to defend it from an unworthy king. They had all wanted to protect something: the goblins, the city, themselves. Ten, protective Kings Jareth.

Jareth did not want to protect anything. They did not need protection.

No, what they needed was a purpose.

And somebody else had needed a purpose. Who had it been? The aging goblin who only stared out of windows, or the aging David who could not even stare as life rushed past? Silly fools, both of them.

A bank of clouds dragged itself to spread out over a smaller cloud, the jaws of a crocodile splaying out into skiffs trailing ribbons of broken glass across moss green rivers.

Earth. He might never see earth again, not the earth he knew.

England was in the past, above ground.

Jareth frowned. Thoughts like that kept intruding on him. He flung his gaze out onto the wastes, fragments of memory falling behind him like exhaust and gravel from an automobile. No, not an automobile. Goblins did not use automobiles. His parents had not even owned a cart. They had walked everywhere. Nothing was far in Goblin City. Not like in Kent.

"There was no Kent," Jareth said. It threw him to hear that his voice had formed as a whimper. His fingertips pressed against his brow ridges. The fingers of one hand traced out the bump his left eye made underneath his eyelid.

"You didn't have to keep it, you know. Any of it. But even if you kept the body, you didn't have to keep his left eye."

"Hoggle," Jareth said. He continued to face the wastes.

"You have the power to fix that eye. Dunno why you've still got it."

"It knew. Somehow, it knew. Thinking on it now, I think George was meant to have damaged it to the point where I should have lost it." He stretched out his legs along the branch he sat on. "I am going to keep it."

An armada of cumulus clouds cleared the way for gaseous rabbits and dragons and winged horses and Jareth wondered at all the fantasy he freely injected into the sky now, after thirty years of, "No such thing as magic."

"I wanted to be someplace else," he said.

"Yeah. David said something like that to me once." Hoggle pulled off his cap and dropped to a cross legged position on the ground, back against the trunk of the tree. "So did the boss. And now you're telling me too." He pulled dried blades of grass from the earth. "You planning on taking off again, then? Piss poor thing to do."

"I shall remain at The Labyrinth, yes."

"Huh." Hoggle scratched the back of his neck, fingers worrying over the deep wrinkles at the nape. "Can't figure you out," he said after a while. "Boss never talked that way, all aristocratic an' stuff. But you're definitely not David. I can't say whether he'd sit on a tree or not, mind you, but he wouldn't magic himself a snazzy new costume for everything he did."

"I was cold," Jareth said, defensive as he drew his fur trimmed motorist coat closer about him.

"Yeah well."

A breeze tumbled organic debris across the ground. Seconds like minutes passed between them. Perhaps it was hours. Hoggle's head dropped back against the tree trunk. He had kept his eyes carefully averted from Jareth all the while, but now he craned his neck and slid his eyes up towards him. He sat with his hands in the pockets of that ludicrous, fur trimmed coat he was wearing, grasshopper legs crossed at the ankles. Snazzy boots, just as Hoggle suspected. Lounging on a tree, dressed to kill.

"Who are you, anyway?" he wanted to say.

But, he found, that did not really matter anymore.

He stood to go. "Well, I'll be off, then. Some of us got things to do."

"I offered you a position at the castle."

"And I said no. I heard your speech. You're gonna bring back the glory days, right? Crawl about snatching human babies and pestering them so that they start having themselves nightmares, right, and the goblins get nice and strong again, maybe grow taller, grow some brains. I heard ya. And that's goblins' work, not a dwarf's." He slapped his cap on his head. "I'm still a standing member of The Maintenance Detail, and that's where I aim to go stay."

"You will stay where I appoint you, Hoggle."

"_He _appointed me to The Maintenance Detail, and you keep claiming you're him!" Hoggle said, his patience snapping. "So, your _majesty_, _you_ appointed me, and if you want to appoint me somewhere else right now, then you go ahead. But this dwarf ain't taking nobody's children!"

"He," Jareth said, voiced laced with contempt and anger. "You keep saying _he_. The boss. David. They don't matter. _I _am king, and I am _your _king." He stood up on the branch, glaring down at Hoggle. "If I let you keep your sorry position, it is only because you did me a good turn as I attempted to return, and because you were loyal to me while I was gone. But if you disobey me again, Hoggle, I shall not be so magnimonious."

Hoggle drew in sharp breaths, willing them to be hands that pressed down on his shoulders, keeping him in place. He wanted nothing more than to rip into Jareth's face, to take David's eyes and cheekbones and lips away from him and pummel away the thing that had taken his place. The violence of the thought surprised Hoggle.

"You shall remain at The Maintenance Detail," Jareth said, his voice like the emptiness and desolation around them. "And you shall not disobey me again."

Hoggle removed his cap. He went down on one knee, slowly. He did not have to do this. Jareth was not making him do this. His heart strained and burned within his chest, the blood hot and seething along his veins. But he knelt and he pressed his cap against his chest and he bowed his head and he said, "As you will, your majesty."

The words washed over him and he felt old and defeated. Anger turned to resignation. He put his cap back on, clambered to his feet, and bowed from the waist. "His majesty is most kind."

Jareth nodded. "You may go."

There was nothing else to say, and no more gestures to place between them. Hoggle made his way down the hill, shuffling a bit as he clambered down in a shower of dry grass and ochre dust. Jareth remained on the tree branch and watched him go. Hoggle took a key from his pocket, fitted it into a hedge, and turned it. Then he nudged the hedge backwards and to the side. He walked through, and soon nothing remained but carefully trimmed leaves settling back into their proper place.

Jareth watched all this, and if he felt any sadness or regret, it did not show.

The wind from the wastes changed directions, and the Goblin King passed from that place.


	16. An Ending Not Unlike a Beginning

**Notes:** I do apologize for the lapse between the last chapter and this one. Great numbers of family descended for the holidays. I want to thank everyone who has read, favourited, and reviewed this story. I plotted it and dreamt it for months before finally writing it, and am glad that I was able to finish it. I sincerely hope you've enjoyed it.

* * *

**16. An Ending Not Unlike a Beginning**

**G**eorge said goodnight to David and closed the door to his flat. Behind him, he could hear Sandra grunt as she heaved Baby Joe up from the floor, where David had left him after his nightly tales of goblins, elves, and fairies.

"Seemed a bit down, didn'e?" George said, clearing away dinner plates.

Sandra joined her hands underneath Baby Joe's tummy, back bent as she negotiated all of his weight. The poor baby resembled a sack of potatoes, his eyes uncomprehending and vague as his mother carried him off to bed. "David?" she said. "He looked a bit glum, yeah. Guess he misses that band of yours more than he lets on."

Perhaps. George did not have much time to dwell on it in the days that followed. His cousin Robert, born in the States and as Yankee as Doodle, dropped out of the hills of New Hampshire and landed at George's English doorstep one fine afternoon, his wife and daughter in tow.

"Hello, George," he said, all flat, wide, American consonants and vowels. "Long time no see, buddy." He stayed for a drink and a chat and then mentioned, casually, as he rummaged in the fridge for one more beer, that he and the wife were actually expected at a party later that night. "Important stuff, George," he said. "Linda might get a part in a West End play. If it does well and moves to Broadway, she is _in_ the money."

Linda looked apologetic and very, very pretty. Black hair in waves down past her shoulders, sharp blues eyes, a complexion so fair it all but glowed. Made for the stage, George had no doubt. "This is all very last minute, you see," she said. "Robert made it seem as if he had cleared this with you before we arrived and, well…" She looped a strand of hair behind her ear. "Sarah's a really sweet child. Well behaved. She won't be any trouble, and it's only for tonight."

"We'll have to put 'er in the lounge. On a couch, see? She mind that?"

Sarah, decked out in a frilly, cream party dress, rainbow knee socks, and Converse sneakers, seemed delighted with the mere idea of the couch. She dropped into it with a squeal and looked for all the world as if she had known her Cousin George all of her short life. George had certainly never seen her. "I got married," said Robert's last postcard. That had been eight years ago. Now he had a six year old girl bouncing on his couch, cream skirt flouncing up and down to reveal purple shorts with little white stars on them.

"Aye, fine then," George said. "Good luck at the party, Linda. Robs, good to see ye again. Don't be a stranger."

They left in an apologetic flurry of waves and kisses, Linda hugging Sarah to her by the door before she disappeared into the night with Robert.

As it turned out, George became Sarah's unofficial babysitter for a few more nights after that. Greasing the wheels of West End casting machinery took considerably more than one party. Robert and Linda did not have much money, and a hotel was deemed an expense they would prefer to avoid. They bought a cheap, inflatable mattress and—with many humble gestures and murmurs of imposition—set themselves up in George's living room, Sarah still quite happy to camp out on the couch. Sandra grumbled at all the extra bodies and the mess they entailed, and Baby Joe kept trying to gnaw through Sarah's shoes every spare second, but, at heart, George was a family man. If his cousin and his wife and their daughter needed a place to sleep for a few weeks, then so be it.

It was only by the second week of tucking Sarah in before kissing Baby Joe good night that it struck George that he had not seen David in all that while.

* * *

King Jareth stood at the heart of an alley in Kent. The place was barely recognizable as the alley he had walked as David Jones. It was no longer even the alley from the night when David had wished himself into The Labyrinth. Hopelessly serpentine masses of twisted rock, staircases, doors and arches piled upon each other. The alley's original tenements and businesses had been pushed away, reconfigured in such a way that none of the residents even noticed that the alley had grown and that it was certainly not even one passageway anymore. Most people seemed to not even realize it was even there.

It took pride in its work, the alley. And it had done a marvellous job. However, its work had been done, and none of its flourishes were needed anymore. Jareth waved one hand in a lazy, dismissive gesture, and the alley zipped back to its original shape with barely the whisper of a brick sliding back into place.

A voice formed at the back of Jareth's head, old and distant. "Is that what he wishes?"

"It is," Jareth said. "You've done a commendable job. I feared for a moment that that fool Sankrėl had corrupted you as well, Singer."

"He may recall that he instructed me to aid him in his return."

"I did. But then you wouldn't grant my wish, to be taken to the centre of The Labyrinth, of _my _Labyrinth."

Jareth turned, eyes narrowed, to gaze coldly at the blue circle glowing faintly on the ground. What had seemed like incomprehensible runes and random bolts of light to David were now undeniably a cluster of shimmering, star-like matter, weaving into myriad shapes. One of the shapes was not unlike an elk. It gazed back at Jareth with an unperturbed, ageless patience.

"He was kept away from the centre of The Labyrinth. He speaks true."

"I never instructed you to do that."

The shape pulsed, tendrils of blue light rising like fine smoke from the ground. "_He_ was also King Jareth," its voice said. "While Sankrėl was alive, he was still master of The Labyrinth, as much as he who is now King Jareth once more. His wishes may have been granted."

This did not please Jareth, but he knew better than to think he could merely dismiss a Singer as easily as he could dismiss a goblin. Singers were part of the very fabric that had been shaped into The Labyrinth, and were older than any creature under Jareth's rule. That they were loyal to the Kings Jareth regardless of their age and power was nothing to be trifled with, least of all insulted.

"You performed your duties well," Jareth said at length, not without a hint of reluctance.

With the ghostly whisper of cold winds caressing his cheeks, the Singer disappeared.

Then, in a shower of powdered glass, Jareth also disappeared. He had one very important person to see that night.

* * *

The doorbell rang as Sandra dipped her hands into sudsy dish water. "Why does this always happen?" she muttered. "George, doorbell!" she called. A series of heavy thumps and a grunt were all the indication she got that George had deigned to tear himself away from whatever, suds-free thing he had been doing in order to unlock the door.

There was a pause, then George's voice rose in a strangled noise that sounded like, "Dayha-ha-day-vud!" This was followed by an excited, "By God, man, where 'ave you _been_? It's been, wot, three bloody weeks? You fall down a well or somethin'? Sandra! Sandra, look, it's Davey! Come look at Davey!"

So it was. That beanpole David was standing in the middle of the living room, same as usual, hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, feet in dirty, tatty boots. He was grinning, a lopsided, jaunty thing that made Sandra wonder. Had David ever smiled like that? Come to think of it, had David's hair always gone down to his shoulders? She frowned, then had to laugh at herself. How silly. His hair was as short as ever. And so what if he looked happy? About time the silly fool smiled.

"Oh, look, mate," George said, "sorry for all the mess. Got me cousin Robert and his old lady over." George picked up socks and shoes as he made his way around the living room, tossing them into a pile by the radiator. "Got me cousin's daughter sleeping on the couch." He bundled up her covers and tossed them at one corner of the room in order to make space for David on the couch.

David looked around him as if he had never seen George's living room in his life. Something about it, however, made him smile in a very strange, secretive way. He turned his mismatched eyes on George and said, "How's Baby Joe?"

George had the strange feeling that something had been bothering him about the way David had been looking at his living room, but now he could no longer even remember being anything but happy to see David again. "Baby Joe's asleep," he said. "At last. Missed your bedtime stories, 'e did."

"Did he?" David picked up a blue and green striped sock, then dropped it in an absentminded way. "How's he coming along? Still big? Strong? He's going to grow up into a regular powerhouse, that little blob."

From the kitchen, David heard Sandra sigh in annoyance. "Please, don't call him a blob." Water splashed as she rinsed a dish, more dishes rattling as she placed it on a rack to dry. "Joe's just big. He'll grow out of it."

"Oh, I don't doubt he will," David said cheerfully. He poked his head into the kitchen and gave Sandra a dazzling smile and a wink. He left her blinking in disconcerted surprise as he sauntered back out into the living room, where George looked as if he could not make up his mind whether to look pleased or perplexed at David's presence and attitude.

At one point, he could have sworn he saw bits of something powdery and shiny on the carpet, snaking along the living room, following David.

Trick of the light, of course. Nothing there but dirt and Sarah's socks.

She chose that night to be uncharacteristically anti-social. When George introduced her to David, she outright glared up at him. This made David's eyebrows rise in mock outrage.

"Well _I'm_ pleased to meet you, Sarah," he said.

He tried to take up her hand and kiss it, but she backed away from him. Before Sandra or George could call her back, she had whirled away into the bathroom in a blur of rainbow socks. The door shut with the click of a lock sliding home.

"What's gotten into her?" Sandra murmured. She thought about checking in on her, making her apologize to David, but the thought was replaced by an urgent need to dry and put away the dishes. No sense leaving them to dry in a rack. She wandered into the kitchen with the distracted notion that she felt oddly muddled that night, as if she had been drinking too much wine. She had barely touched a glass of water.

David clasped his hands behind his back and rocked on his heels. "So," he said. "George. Been keeping well?"

"Tolerably," George said. "Posters didn't set the world on fire, but I got some gigs as a session musician. Nothin' fancy, mind you, but it's a paycheque, right? How's Moliere?"

"Dead," David said.

"Really? That was quick. Usually a new pub hangs on for at least a month before it shuts down. You on the dole again, then?"

The Moliere Pub. Of course. How bothersome of him to have forgotten. Rather out of character for someone like George to ask about 17th century French playwrights. He nodded his head and George prattled on placidly about how David was still employed at Moliere, doing splendidly well and quite chuffed with the owners' decision to dress everyone in what looked like blue and purple lame.

He kept the conversation up for a few more minutes before he sent George off in search of a board game buried deep within piles of laundry in the bedroom. With Sandra compelled to stay in the kitchen, wiping down the counters, and that little girl, Sarah, locked into the bathroom in a fit of unpleasantness, the path to Baby Joe's room was blessedly clear. Moonlight clung to the walls and the wooden bars of his crib as he walked in.

Baby Joe looked up at him in a daze as he lay on his crib, one chubby arm up by its head. If he had any opinions on long haired men dressed in dark purple silk and trailing powdered glass bending over him, he saw no need to share this opinion.

"Hello," Jareth said. His lips drew back over his teeth as Baby Joe gurgled out what could have been a laugh. "Oh, yes, you can smile, little blob. This _is _a good thing." He reached out one hand and tickled the fleshy bunch of skin that should have been Baby Joe's chin. The baby kicked one leg and smiled in a vague, surprised way. "That's a good boy," Jareth cooed. "Such a good boy."

Baby Joe made no further sounds as Jareth bent down to scoop him up from the crib.

"Ooph," Jareth said. "My but that you're quite the heavy little thing, aren't you?"

He straightened up, Baby Joe cradled in his arms, only to discover someone had stepped into the room. He readied the magic to change back into his human guise, to turn everything into a trick from a wishful eye, but stopped as he saw who it was: George's rude little cousin once removed. Sarah stood at the doorway to Baby Joe's room in her cream party dress and rainbow socks.

"What are you doing?" she said.

With a careful, lazy gesture, Jareth lifted up and drew back one side of his silk coat. He placed Baby Joe inside, cooing softly to him even as Baby Joe remained chubby and oblivious, staring in uncomprehending bewilderment at the dark folds around him. From within the folds, several somethings winked on and off, almost like stars. Jareth waved at Baby Joe with the fingers of his free hand, then drew his coat closed.

Baby Joe disappeared.

Jareth took one step towards Sarah, hands clasped behind his back. "Well now," he said.

Sarah remained at the door. Her fingers tightened around the doorframe, but she kept her eyes on Jareth. "You don't scare me," she said.

"Nobody's trying to scare you, you sorry little girl." He looked down at Sarah's left hand and saw that she carried a book. Before she could react, he bent down and plucked it from her fingers. He turned the cover towards the moonlight. _A Child's Book of Faeries. _"How charming." He shook out the book, so that its cloth bound cover rippled and shook out from egg blue to deep red. He held out the book to Sarah.

She opened her mouth. "I'm not sca—"

"Yes, we've covered your lack of fear." He held out the book once more. Sarah took it with the frown of the stubborn brave. Jareth smiled indulgently at her, like a doting father on Christmas morning. "Good girl. Read that instead of all that faerie doggerel. You might learn a thing or two about the proper way to behave when in our presence."

The book was slight and slim, and looked older than anything Cousin George owned. "The Labyrinth," Sarah read out. She made as if to open the book, then dropped it to the floor. "I want my old book back."

"Such a spoiled, sorry little girl," Jareth said. He stretched out one hand and placed the tip of his index finger against Sarah's forehead. "You're a silly child. Why don't you forget you ever saw me, and go right back to playing with your dresses and your toys, hm?" He drew back his hand, now barely an outline. "You can keep the book."

Sarah saw him fade away to nothing, but soon her eyes passed from childish defiance to blank disorientation. She had no idea why she had come into Baby Joe's room, or why she was staring so intently at empty space. Perhaps she had been sent to fetch something, but she could not remember what. And she must have been fantastically scatterbrained about it, because she had even dropped her book. She picked it up, dusted it off, and wandered back into the living room. She would have to ask Cousin George what he had sent her to fetch again.

Jareth watched her go.

"Hey, Sarah," George said, his voice light and cheery, coming from the kitchen. "Have you seen me mate, Davey? I introduced you to 'im, right? He must be pullin' some invisibility trick. One minute he's 'ere, and me with me Parcheesi board all ready, an' next minute he disappears on me." He laughed. "Let's put some chips out. That'll bring him running."

He sounds different, a wistful voice within Jareth said. Happier. More at ease. It'll be a terrible blow when—

"David," Jareth said. "I will not tolerate these lapses any longer. I had thought to let you say goodbye to these humans, but I do believe I have changed my mind."

Jareth raised his right arm. He flicked his index finger, barely a twitch, and the room was empty of him.

A goblin, Pam, came officiously towards him as he solidified within his castle throne room. "Sire, you'll be glad to know that the human child has completed its journey over safe and sound. He looks, if I may say so, your majesty, most promising."

"He is, isn't he?" he said absently. "He had good parents."

"Sire…?"

Jareth frowned. He waved his hand and, with barely time to yelp, Pam dropped away through the floor and down into the kitchens. Jareth moved his still outstretched arm within his eyesight and curled his fingers, as if he were crushing an invisible object, strangling the empty air. It took him a while, his features trembling with the effort. Finally, his fingers tightened into a fist, and his face smoothed itself out. A few creases that had been worrying him—tension, some misplaced melancholy and useless regrets—disappeared completely.

"You _were _warned, David," he said.

He opened his fist, and a few shards of crushed brown glass scattered in a summoned wind. If he thought anything as they dispersed, it did not show on his face, and he barely acknowledged it.

Pam found himself being pulled up from the kitchens and through the throne room floor with a pop in his ears. It disconcerted him a great deal, but he tried his best to look as if this sort of thing happened to him all the time. "Your majesty?" he said with a slight bow.

"There's a dwarf working with the Maintenance Detail," Jareth said. "Honkle, or something like that. It occurs to me that he was quite rude to me recently. Put him in for a pay cut." Pam nodded. "And hire at least fifty goblins to clean the castle. It's a disgrace."

"Yes, my lord."

"And I need a new throne. This horrid leather thing is an embarrassment. Hire a stone mason. A good one. Pay him more money than he's ever seen in his life. I want a new throne by tomorrow night." He snapped his fingers at a lanky goblin shuffling past on his way to the lower floors. "And _you_, do something about furniture. You can't all sit on the floor."

The goblin looked equal parts terrified and mystified. "U-us, your majesty?"

"Yes," Jareth said impatiently. "Us. We. Myself and any goblin chosen as part of castle staff. You're my new interior decorator." He clapped twice, and the goblin—Somsuch, who had been aimlessly trespassing and had not counted on anyone noticing him—found himself dressed in gold and black, an insignia pinned to his smart new vest. "Go and buy new chairs and recliners and tables and all that," Jareth said.

Pam and Somsuch stood there, somewhat dumbfounded.

Jareth tapped his foot in irritation, hand on his hip. "Well?"

And the goblins scrambled and scampered away to do King Jareth's bidding. They have been doing so to this very day, and life has been altogether tolerable within Goblin City and The Labyrinth.

There are some goblins who whisper that, once, the king became fascinated by a mortal girl, and that his heart was irrevocably broken. But that is another story, and one should never believe a goblin's tale anyway.

This much is true: he was the last King Jareth.

FINI


End file.
